To be honest, I am glad they did. I am sick and tired of these people finding that there are loopholes in which they can hide their hate speech and fascist rhetoric.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't post like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25022331, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
I can understand why you might feel that way. At the same time, I think censorship on an infrastructure level sets a very strong precedent. I think infrastructure players should refrain completely from that kind of action.
At the end of the day if my buisness is hosting something the market does not like, my buisness will suffer. It becomes harder to retain and attract new customers and grow my buisness and interfers with my marketing messaging. We live in a capitalistic society this is how the free market works.
I just don't think AWS should be considered core infrastructure. ISPs are definitely core infra, which is why I think net neutrality is so important. Domain name registrars and CC processors are a bit of a grey area for me, since those gate access to the internet and online financial services respectively, but there's plenty of precedent for blocking certain businesses from both of those services.
AWS is great the servers you run. Those can be anywhere on earth, including physically located at your business
I think we disagree on what censorship means. To me, censorship very clearly means an active effort to go out and eliminate a particular type of speech or a particular speaker. That means going out and finding that speech or speaker and shutting them down, everywhere.
In this instance, a platform decides, effectively "we refuse to host your ideas, go elsewhere." Facebook and Google and Twitter aren't going out of their way to scrub these people off the internet; they are just kicking them off their own platform.
You might consider this part of the "cancel culture", but it's not censorship.
Sorry, I don't think that is censorship. It is just the bar owner deciding he had enough about you insulting the patrons and kicked you out, but you can keep saying your shit. Just not in his bar.
This power could be used to sensor you in the future. This power could be put in the hands of a group of people who thinks completely different from you.
That power has always existed, and could have always been used "by those who think completely different" from us. If they think that differently, then they wouldn't even think twice about using said power to censor.
In this case, Twitter et al. thought a LOT about what to do, as they did very little for 4 year's of Trump's presidency, and only decided to act after Trump incited a literal self-coup and insurrection with the goal of illegitimately keeping himself in power.
If in the future "those who think completely differently from me" are going to think liberal ideas are so dangerous to be removed, it won't matter what "standard" we set today. It seems even with the highest standard of "don't support open coups", you still think I will be judged the exact same.
Censorship is bad. But insurrections against legitimate governments are worse.
I do agree 100% with you. That's why I do think we need to decrease the power of the state and also the power of the corporations using a modern antitrust law. If they power continues to grow, we'll live in a totalitarian state, dictate by politicians and corporations together.
Honestly, where on earth have you people been? Tech companies have been "censoring" all sorts of people they deem undesirable for years, why is it the literal terrorist white supremacists that caused everyone to sit up and notice?
How do HN readers, who I presume would generally support safe harbor provisions for free speech, common carrier rules etc, not find it deeply alarming that this is happening? Even if Parler hosted straight up illegal content, surely the proportional response is to block those accounts, not the entire platform? If no, why aren't we deplatforming Twitter or Facebook next?
Blocking individual accounts is something Parler can do (and chose not to), not Amazon/Facebook/Google who don't have access to the contents of those accounts (at least not easily).
Also, it's worth looking at some of the hacked info that was released - Parler had a serious moderation system, but it was used to make sure people had MAGA viewpoints, not to prevent violence. This is not some free and open platform, it was a controlled one that purposely built an echo chamber of violent rhetoric. Twitter and Facebook don't allow the same kind of violent rhetoric, lies, etc., and while they may not do an ideal (or even good) job at it, the fact is they're broad platforms used for a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people and are absolutely not comparable to Parler.
I can remember very well calls for violence in twitter against Nick Sandemann. And I remember very well those calls for violence not being removed at all.
Also, during the riots of 2020, it was extremely common to find calls to violence in twitter that weren't deleted.
What's your point, that they apply TOS inconsistently? I don't think anyone will disagree with that assessment. They let Trump violate the TOS for 4 years.
They are perfectly within their rights as a private business to make those exceptions. Is it fair? No. Would we much rather they apply things consistently? Yes.
The question is, do we want to enforce who and what they can and cannot allow on their platform via law, or do we want private businesses to control who they are allowed to do business with?
Because Parler was explicitly designed to host reprehensible speech, and was not making a good-faith effort in censoring their platform. Those hosting the platform decided "nah, we don't want to be associated with this" and cut them off.
These free-speech advocates still have the ability to create mastodon instances or a listserv or something else where a company doesn't have that leverage over them. They still have options and this crying is overblown.
I am actually comforted by the fact that people are allowed to espouse views and ideas that I personally find reprehensible.
However, I do not find psy-ops to undermine our democracy by Russia and other parties to be freedom of expression, any more than they have a right to use platforms to rob a bank (something I'm grudgingly somewhat sympathetic toward).
I think it’s one thing if Twitter bans DJT. In the end it’s their platform, and their rules. But I feel very different about infrastructure players starting their censorship based on what’s happening 1 or even 2 steps further down the line. It’s a wrong move and will just push the discussion somewhere else, the least. The worst that this might lead is that the internet breaks off into several non-communicating islands, which we all don’t want.
If we’re talking about individual ISPs, backhaul providers, and electricity companies, I agree. But we’re not.
If anything, we should be more bothered that people consider something like AWS or any of the other major clouds, core infrastructure akin to backhaul or electricity. (Google Play and the App Store have always had very clear TOS rules that limit certain types of content so I don’t even see them as being part of the discussion.)
I fundamentally agree that something like Parler, as abhorrent as much of its content was, has the right to exist somewhere on the internet, but I just as fundamentally disagree that Amazon should be forced to provide them with services or that we should equate having a right to exist with “having the right to exist on X’s brand of compute.”
But how far can this principle be applied? I admit this is complete hyperbole, but what if your local grocery stores forbade you from buying food there because they didn't want people associating them with you? I think there's a grey area to explore here where that principle becomes unsustainable, and even though this banning was done for noble purposes it still isn't a norm I'd want to curse future generations with.
Hasn’t this always been the norm though? People with abhorrent views are not welcome in polite society. The idea that I should be forced to associate with those people is definitely not a norm I’d want to curse future generations with.
But in your grocery store example, if the stores rules are “customers need to wear a mask, wear shoes, wear a shirt,” and I refuse to do those things, or I strip naked inside the store, or cause a commotion and start screaming epithets at other customers, that store is more than welcome to ban me from entering again. Now, if it is literally the only store in existence, that’s a more complicated question, but me being inconvenienced by having to go to a store further away as a consequence of not following a place of businesses rules is fair game.
What a store can’t do (at least in the US), is say, “we won’t let you shop here because your skin color is this, or you’re from this part of town, or you practice this religion, or are this sexual orientation.” Now, if a person who matches one of those descriptions and chooses to violate rules and screams at people in the middle of the store, they can be denied service for that reason, just not on the basis of their race or religion, etc.
Parler violated AWS’s terms of service. I’m not going to be obtuse pretend that the type of political ideology that Parler actively seeks out/evangelizes/caters to, doesn’t make them a target, of course it does. That doesn’t negate the fact that the TOS was violated and there was no real plan of action from excising content that violated Amazon’s TOS from the platform. (Although I want to be clear, getting a bunch of conservative celebrities and Fox News hosts on your platform as a way to try to buy respectability doesn’t mean that the rhetoric extolled by Parler CEO and championed by the service is mainstream or even mainstream conservative. Parler was/is a place that was not about free speech but about pro-Trump speech; dissenters were banned from the service, which is Parler’s right, but it was hardly a “free speech” platform.)
Again, I’m not arguing Parler doesn’t have the right to exist. But I am arguing that AWS shouldn’t be obligated to host it. I’m also arguing that as big as AWS and the other clouds are, they are not yet at the point of being true pieces of immovable infrastructure. And honestly, I hope they never are. Even those of us who don’t shed any tears for Parler, probably agree that we don’t want to live in a world where the only options for hosting a website or app belong to a FAANG.
If it were an issue of an ISP or a backhaul provider denying access to the service, I would be the very first person criticizing and standing up to the action. But that’s not what happened here. Someone came into a store without shoes, without a shirt, without a mask, screaming in the face of the employees and other customers. They aren’t allowed to shop at that store anymore. But a store that might be a little further away is still an option.
What is your definition of Free speach? In america we have a fredom of speach to protect the people from the government. Not to protect the government from the people. As a buisness owner i may refuse some one/entitiy service, it is how the free market works.
Can you really? Here in Sweden, if a business owner refuses service to people based on political opinions or similar they are in for a world of hurt. I imagine it’s the same in most of the western world.
So if a neo-Nazi walks into a restaurant and says that all Jews should burn to death then tries to order lunch and is refused, that owner is in for a world of hurt?
We need to stop pretending like everyone's viewpoint is equal and we shouldn't exclude people for what they believe. Violent racists should be ostracized and pushed out of society. People who choose to have those kinds of beliefs are a constant threat to the safety of people around them.
Now obviously it's a blurry line, but again, the neo-Nazis storming the capital and their ilk are just way over the line. Just because it's blurry doesn't mean we have to pretend it doesn't exist out of some sense of fairness.
It is a founding principle of western civilization that you cannot be prosecuted for thoughts and ideas. All viewpoints and thoughts are equal before the law; only actions can be prosecuted.
> We need to stop pretending like everyone's viewpoint is equal and we shouldn't exclude people for what they believe. Violent racists should be ostracized and pushed out of society. People who choose to have those kinds of beliefs are a constant threat to the safety of people around them.
I will hard disagree with this every day of the week. To me this is a clear example of how ideology has taken the place of religion in today's society. It's no longer enough for you to be civil and respect the laws, but even having the wrong thoughts is considered criminal, just like lust and envy are considered sinful in religion.
We're heading in a dark direction if we're re-adopting the same principles and perspectives that were behind McCarthyism, let alone used to burn witches and conduct the Inquisition.
> All viewpoints and thoughts are equal before the law; only actions can be prosecuted.
And this would be an issue if we were actually talking about government action, but we are talking about private individuals deciding who they will associate with. When the government gets involved then you have reason for concern, but if this is private parties engaging in commerce you have absolutely no leg to stand on.
It's a bad faith argument, yet it's everywhere. I'd think HN would be better than that, yet here we are, having the same fight every time free speech is the topic.
Also note that the parent mentioned "government action" whereas the GP is referring to a business taking action. The distinction is incredibly important, yet so many free-speech purists respond to corporate action as if it was a government action.
So do you agree we were wrong to ban ISIS recruiting groups on facebook?
Less sarcastically, do you agree that the amplification of thought and rhetoric possible using social media isn't something that was considered 500 years ago? i.e. having wrong thoughts isn't dangerous, but having 75 million followers and pushing your wrong thoughts on them is dangerous. It isn't thoughts any longer - it's an action.
I think the owner would get sued, but I'm not sure if it would hold up in US court. We have laws preventing businesses from discriminating based on race, sex, ethnicity, and national origin, but I don't know if there are any such protections that apply to businesses for political affiliation.
The US tends to bias towards letting market pressures take care of this sort of thing, and then stepping in if there are enough high-profile cases of failure.
There are also a bunch of edge cases that I think most people would be ok with. There are conservative-only dating sites. I wouldn't be allowed on the platform, but that doesn't really bother me. If there was a republican-only grocery store, that gets sketchy. And if there was a democrat-only government program, that would clearly be illegal.
Fun fact- political affiliation, which is not a protected class in most of the US, IS in fact a protected class in DC. So yeah, you can kick someone out of your bar simply for wearing a MAGA hat in almost the entire US...except for DC.
> I think the owner would get sued, but I'm not sure if it would hold up in US court. We have laws preventing businesses from discriminating based on race, sex, ethnicity, and national origin, but I don't know if there are any such protections that apply to businesses for political affiliation.
It depends on the context.
Political affiliation is a protected class for employment in some states[0].
Political affiliation is a protected class for accommodations such as grocery stores in DC[1] and Madison, Wisconsin[2].
(In US) I agree that business owners should never refuse people based on political opinions. I would be firmly against AWS/Google not willing to work with a company because it has conservative views.
In Parler's case, the issue isn't that they are conservative. The issue is that they refuse to take any responsibility for the hate and violence on their platform. John Matze had every opportunity to take responsibility for the content, but he was vocal that he would not do anything about it.
If I were running a cloud provider company, I wouldn't want anything to do with this behavior either. Who cares whether the users lean right or left - hate and violence are unacceptable.
And yet, there's plenty of hate and violence on Twitter, but they're not getting 24h notices before being deplatformed from the Apple app store. Take some key phrases from the Parler screenshots and paste them into a Twitter search.. it's pretty eye-opening.
> if a business owner refuses service to people based on political opinions or similar they are in for a world of hurt
That surprises me. "Political opinion" is not a protected class [1] in most jurisdictions in the US, and I assume that the same holds for whatever the local equivalent is to protected class. Especially considering that a lot of European countries also have laws that prohibit Holocaust denial--which are unconstitutional in the US per the 1st Amendment.
[1] Protected class, in US discrimination law jargon, is an attribute that you cannot legally use to discriminate against. The usual protected classes are sex, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, age, sexual orientation, and gender identity, although there is some variation from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (e.g., military service is protected in my state).
You’re right to be surprised. I looked it up and political opinion actually isn’t protected in Sweden either.
There are other laws that prevent business owners from denying people entry or removing somebody from their store or similar (see Supreme Court decision NJA 1995 s. 84). They can’t even prevent people who have historically stolen from them from coming in and spending time in the store. But apparently they don’t have to do business with them. I thought they did.
Broadly speaking, the situation you described is legal in the US. We have protected classes that you're not allowed to discriminate against, but "political belief/affiliation" isn't one of them.
Actually, it’s not in Sweden either. I thought it was, but it’s apparently not.
There are other laws that prevent business owners from denying people entry or removing somebody from their store or similar (see Supreme Court decision NJA 1995 s. 84). They can’t even prevent people who have historically stolen from them from coming in and spending time in the store. But apparently they don’t have to do business with them. I thought they did.
Freedom of speech exists to provide freedom of expression, even if it is controversial. I don't consider planning crimes, especially ones that would end freedom of expression as a societal value, to be covered under freedom of speech.
Certainly each individual comment on Parler can't be considered to be planning a crime. That can't be said for the platform as a whole.
The key thing here is that Parler _refused_ to do this.
Had Parler done this these companies wouldn’t have distanced themselves from them. But also their whole brand is enabling those accounts so had they blocked those accounts they wouldn’t have a community.
One current model of what's happened/happening, is the US system of politics is broken (first-past-the-post voting in states, 2 seats per state, two party, polarization ... and now on top of that the drawback of the separately elected president is that now the Executive and the Legislation was in a deadlock), so the private sector stepped in its usual awkward way. (FB/Tw/YT profited from hosting recruiting content, they did some minor moderation to calm advertisers, but now real people realized that they have the capacity, right and maybe even moral duty to do something with the problem they helped to create, so reverse course, full throttle backward, bam-bam, ban, ban.)
It's not about illegal content. It's about politics and ethics. (And private companies can choose to do or not do business with whomever they want - except a few protected things. But there's a gay wedding cake somewhere too in this. Free association and free speech. Ethically it's hard to coerce anyone to say or not say something, and to host or not host some content.)
Furthermore, there's the power imbalance aspect. Twitter banning SciHub is probably Twitter abusing its power, Twitter banning Trump is less likely an abuse. (Though there very well could be and are exceptions.)
If my account could downvote I would. I dont want the top comment once again to be some generic free speech fundamentalism. It amounts to putting our head in the sand. We should be able to rank, sort, and discriminate between different competing challenges to the peaceful (as if everyone even agrees that this is good) conduct of civilization.
By all means "deplatform" Facebook, please, but why would you condone that and condemn deplatforming Parler? makes no sense.
> Even if Parler hosted straight up illegal content, surely the proportional response is to block those accounts, not the entire platform? If no, why aren't we deplatforming Twitter or Facebook next?
I've made this exact argument. It's a blatant double standard that Youtube or Twitter, as you said, aren't held liable for the content their users upload, but Amazon and Google can deplatform whoever they want for whatever they want.
I've read a joke that we're officially in a cyberpunk world now that corporations are "going to war" with each other. I've thought that our society has been heading towards civil war for years, but only in the past year with so many riots and corporate overreach have I started to believe it might actually come sooner than later.
Except Twitter and Youtube routinely moderate their content.
It isn't perfect but they are actively and publicly doing so. Parler publicly seems to take the stance of no to little moderation. I haven't read the hacked info from the site on principle of how it was distributed/hacked but seems that data confirms it based on others notes in the thread
So lets think about this for a minute. What is the goal? To stop violence and to stop promulgating illegal material? Or to make it look like you want to stop violence?
If its the latter, then lets continue to deplatform people. If its the former, then lets ban facebook, twitter et al given their proven history of allowing violence and hate speech and as an essential tool to organize mobs.
The logic here is terrible and you can't argue against that. No matter how many users parler gets, it won't even come close to having the same reach.
> If its the former, then lets ban facebook, twitter et al given their proven history of allowing violence and hate speech and as an essential tool to organize mobs.
Sounds good to me... They're totally culpable for the domestic terrorism that happened at the capitol. Facebook too. Dogshit companies that track our behavior and make money off of outrage.
I think the goal is to largely remove illegal content, which is obviously a massive problem you want to be more conservative about when you consider moderation. In that regard, it is a good thing that Twitter, Youtube, Facebook etc. aren't perfect yet but are clearly trying to remove that kind of content because it signifies they are conservatively (and in some cases quite blatantly not acting fast/well/consistently enough).
Compare that to Parler which has built its whole marketing image on "absolute free speech" which technically isn't legal and their platform's contents reflect that.
Parler is blatantly NOT trying to stop illegal material, the other platforms are at least trying to...
You're missing the point. This is the real world, not the try Olympics. If I buy a burger from you at a fast food place, and you bring me back a bun, but you tried really hard to make me that burger -- I don't care. Go get me my burger.
If you're trying really hard no to, but still facilitate 1000x the amount of violence (made up statistics), it doesn't matter. The real world results are what matter. At least, its what should matter.
No, I think you are missing the point by a LOT. Your expectation is that EVERY burger must be made perfectly and if it's not its fixed RIGHT away.
Even at a moderately busy McDonalds there will be errors in your order. You can always go back and tell them to fix it and then you will wait... because they are busy filling new orders. And even after you waited there is a chance that they forgot about your fix, they remade it and it is still wrong, or something else happens.
This kind of stuff happens all the time in the real world. In fact, restaurants and food safety scores are the epitome of "try Olympics." You can have a rat in a kitchen in San Francisco and still not be immediately closed. But if you are making conscious efforts to remedy that, you can stay open and often have a long time to fix it.
Didn't Twitter block that from trending [1]? Considering that it was moderated, how is this a counter argument to a claim that Twitter moderates content posted to its site?
What is an objective measure we can codify into law as to whether a platform is moderated enough?
Parler likely had a much higher percentage of content advocating for violence, but youtube and twitter probably have hundreds or thousands of times the quantity and reach for the violence advocacy content they host.
Free speech doesn’t mean you have the right to go over to your neighbors house and print out and distribute hate speech from their printer.
Parlour used AWS property to allow its members to help organize sedition. AWS has the right to nope out.
All the problems with large private entities like Twitter and Facebook hosting speech on their own terms pale in to comparison with letting governments dictate how they host speech.
Parlour can find or create another hosting device and get back up quickly. If they want to use mainstream services, they should moderate out something other than liberals.
I personally would be very angry if their ISP refused them access, because I believe the internet should be a public utility that everyone can use and "you can still yell on the public square" wouldn't be a good faith argument.
But I don't feel the same way about AWS, because they are not as critical as an ISP would be. Nothing is stopping Parler from plugging in and managing their own servers. I see AWS as a convenience, and as such I don't think anyone is entitled to it.
As a side note: I would like to take a minute to remind the youngsters that no one owes them a revolution. If you want to go fight against the status quo, you should really have a plan for when the status quo fights back.
This is action taken because AWS's customer (Parler) specifically did not take that action. Since the raison d'etre for Parler is to host content not acceptable to mainstream social media sites, it seems reasonable to assume they won't in good faith moderate their content.
Why should AWS care though? It's infrastructure. They should not be disconnecting service just because the infrastructure is used for something they perceive as evil. It would be like Verizon automatically dropping calls if you make a phone call and try to say something evil to the person on the other line.
Maybe, but that's not how internet services are currently regulated. Ironically, because the Republicans have fought that type of regulation tooth and nail.
AWS cares because they're a public company with a reputation, and many of their customers and employees are anti-rioter.
Parler stated in its lawsuit that it removed all the content that Amazon pointed out...
'On January 8, 2021, AWS brought concerns to Parler about user content that encouraged violence. Parler addressed them, and then AWS said it was “okay” with Parler.'
'The next day, January 9, 2021, AWS brought more “bad” content to Parler and Parler took down all of that content by the evening'
"AWS knew its allegations contained in the letter it leaked to the press that Parler was not able to find and remove content that encouraged violence was false—because over the last few days Parler had removed everything AWS had brought to its attention and more. Yet AWS sought to defame Parler nonetheless."
How long has Amazon been asking them to moderate violent content? The lawsuit says it was a three day timeline, start to suspension, and then 36 hours until they were taken offline. I haven't seen any comment from Amazon talking about the timeline on their decision. I get a pit in my stomach thinking that in the span of 3 days an internet business with +10 million users can get shut down instantly. Was there no middle ground where they worked collaboratively to let Parler pause, clean up, and get moderation in place? Sure the CEO was bombastic, but in the lawsuit they said Amazon ghosted them and that their contract said they get 30 days.
The current AWS Acceptable Use Policy has been in place since September 16th, 2016. It's not like Amazon suddenly changed the rules with little notice.
If you are going to run a site full of user content, you really need to read the rules you are agreeing to regarding what content services you depend on such as web hosting allows, and put in place mechanisms to keep your users from posting that kind of content and to find and remove it when it does get through.
Parler was never a good faith actor. They are profiteers looking to corral a conservative audience. They were more than happen to moderate descriptions of areola, but not violence.
We do have a big tech problem. Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, and Apple should be broken up. Twitter should be required to improve moderation and bot removal. Public/Private enterprises should be established to provide alternates to Twitter/Parler.
The entire point of "freedom of speech" is freedom of expression. Ongoing psy-ops from Russia and other parties to undermine US democracy are not what I would consider freedom of expression.
Which generally requires collusion. There was no collusion. These are independent actors in a competitive space that arrived at the same conclusion independently.
People want free speech. You get free speech so long as your speech doesn’t unduly impinge on other’s liberties. That is the trade off we accept when we exchange the rule of force for the rule of law in a self governing, democratic society.
People are not complaining about business practices. People are complaining about not being able to say whatever they want over whatever medium they want even if other people get dead.
I suppose that the article is talking about monopolies in their respective market (namely iOS app stores, Android app store, and "the cloud").
Unless you're quite tech savvy, you can't sign up for Parler anymore by using a competitor. So, while I mostly disagree with Greenwald, I don't think this characterisation is unfair.
Multiple companies banding together is not a monopoly. This was a collective effort. You could call it a polyoploy but click-bait gonna click-bait.
They didn't kill Parker though, we did. We made if clear that we wouldn't do business with companies that supported the worst of us. They complied with our demands to force them out of the public sphere and I applaud them for it. As an ex Googler and generally anti FAANG, I don't have many fond words for them but I support this action. For the most part, I even approve of the timeline: let garbage peddling monsters be garbage peddling monsters until they do real damage and then cut them off.
Ya why would AWS have any reason to stop providing service to a customer who didn’t follow their terms of service and took pride in a festering a community of terrorists who are now making credible threats to attack aws and recently tried to overthrow the US government in a violent coup.
The mental gymnastics of the people defending Parler on here are wild. If Parler was a community of ISIS or any non-white non-christian extremists none of y’all would be insisting on Apple or Amazon’s requirement to do business with them and be complicit.
Completely not true. ISIS, Hamas, and other Wahhabistic groups still maintain a very large presence on these platforms. A little closer to home, riots and looting were planned in real time on Twitter. It's admittedly a very hard problem to solve.
I do not know if Twitter uses AWS now but it looks like they will be, I believe that Parler mentioned it in the lawsuit it filed.
'Amazon.com Inc.'s AMZN, Amazon Web Services announced Tuesday that Twitter Inc. would be using its cloud services to support its delivery of users' timeliness.'
In 2018 Twitter banned over 1 million ISIS linked accounts. Prior to that they banned hundreds of thousands. Without much of a peep from the free speech fundamentalists.
Back in 2014, ~50K accounts were posting support for ISIS. Parlor got one day's notice. How much notice did twitter get before the liberal consensus was to remove it from the Internet for inciting hate?
Not true. AWS has been working with Parler for "several weeks" [0] to help it comply with their TOS. Not only did they fail to remove the posts Amazon provided, the calls for violence on their platform got worse during that time.
If you're really going to go down this line of argument - do you think it's incorrect to say that AWS banned Parler because the Parler team can still 'use' AWS through twitter?
I'm not sure what the point of this nitpicking is. The context of this conversation is someone asking for an example of ISIS using AWS, in a conversation about the capitol hill rioters "using" AWS. And my response is that they indeed use it in the same way. Now, if you want to argue that this doesn't in fact constitute "using", then the capitol hill rioters didn't use AWS either, and AWS isn't responsible for them.
I think we have different reads of the root comment of this thread. Yoav[1] was talking about the contract between AWS and Parler as corporate entities. I'm not sure how you made the leap from organizational relationships to individuals using services implemented on AWS.
That's why I asked about members of Parler still being able to "use" AWS through other AWS-hosted services. I don't get what you're driving at.
> AWS isn't responsible for them.
Again, I'm not sure I understand what point this is responding to. No one is claiming AWS is responsible for the capital hill folks. They are claiming that Parler bears some responsibility and did so in such a way that violated AWS' policies. So AWS banned them.
> The mental gymnastics of the people defending Parler on here are wild. If Parler was a community of ISIS or any non-white non-christian extremists none of y’all would be insisting on Apple or Amazon’s requirement to do business with them and be complicit.
This is a very typical of the drivel from the pro censorship crowd. Not even an attempt to formulate any coherent principle, just acccusations of bad faith, hypocrisy and racism, without any evidence whatsoever. This is the top comment as I'm writing this. This is apparently the best defense they have to offer.
That anything is justified as long as it's done in the same of anti-fascism is indeed a coherent principle, though not exactly one with a noble history. The official name of the Berlin Wall was Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart[1].
> If Parler was a community of ISIS or any non-white non-christian extremists none of y’all would be insisting on Apple or Amazon’s requirement to do business with them and be complicit.
This is the accusation without evidence that I'm talking about. It's not an accusation against random parler users, but an accusation against those of us who do not think that AWS should decide what's allowed on the internet.
I can show you screenshots of tweets that are as bad or worse. The difference is that Twitter actually has built up, over time, the ability to moderate fairly well.
The value of Twitter isn't really that you can post and view small snippets of text. It's that they've developed technology that allows them to effectively moderate.
Any poorly moderated site eventually becomes associated with the right.
Agreed. One Parler, one could search for terms like "execute" or "hang" and get thousands of results. It was a vile place. The owners of the site have chosen to die on the hill of protecting that as "free speech".
You can post outrageously racist, threatening hate speech on @jack's Internet Hate Machine all day long as long as you're attacking the race on which the woke hive mind has unanimously agreed that it is deserving of eternal deprecation and punishment on the basis of their melanin alone. https://i.imgur.com/fjbhBms.jpg
As improbable as it sounds there are people who would much rather live in a world where people are judged on the basis of their character, instead of a race and gender based purity spiral, and those indeed constituted the majority of the Parler userbase when I spent some short time there.
>>Not even an attempt to formulate any coherent principle, just acccusations of bad faith, hypocrisy and racism, without any evidence whatsoever.
The US Capitol got breached and looted by deranged insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021. There was a guy walking with a Confederate flag inside the building. And they were all supported and incited by many prominent conservative figures, including current politicians. Including the President himself.
What other evidence do you need that these people have been acting on bad faith, hypocrisy and racism?
> If Parler was a community of ISIS or any non-white non-christian extremists none of y’all would be insisting on Apple or Amazon’s requirement to do business with them and be complicit.
This is the accusation of bad faith, hypocrisy and racism that I'm talking about. It's not an accusation against random parler users, but an accusation against those of us who do not think that AWS should decide what's allowed on the internet.
“Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder. …
“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”
“I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so, because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. … And I actually — I just spoke to Mike. I said: ‘Mike, that doesn’t take courage. What takes courage is to do nothing. That takes courage.’”
“I also want to thank our 13 most courageous members of the U.S. Senate, Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Ron Johnson, Senator Josh Hawley. … Senators have stepped up. We want to thank them. I actually think, though, it takes, again, more courage not to step up, and I think a lot of those people are going to find that out. And you better start looking at your leadership, because your leadership has led you down the tubes.”
“We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal. …
“You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen. These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media. It’s all part of the suppression effort. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it. …
“We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
---
This is incitement, pure and simple. I mean, look at this shit:
"We will never give up. We will never concede."
"You will have an illegitimate president... and we can't let that happen."
"...if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
What else do you need? Are you looking for instances where Trump told the crowd to attack and breach the Capitol before you're convinced that he's guilty?
That's exactly what I'm looking for: evidence that he told the crowd to attack and breach the Capitol. Because there isn't any and yet that's what he's being accused of in the media. You are of course welcome to read these words and interpret them any way you see fit but I don't see any incitement or calls for violence here. Neither would a court.
"fighting" is often used in a political context, we have people on both sides of congress saying it publicly as recently as 2020. This is constitutionally-protected political speech.
Your case would be much stronger had Trump not explicitly said people should go "peacefully".
None of those sound all that inflammatory. Mostly just political rhetoric.
"We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong." -- In context, he is saying: "Cheer for the Republicans in congress, maybe not so much for the ones who aren't backing me because they aren't showing strength" -- nothing about that seems like it is incitement.
Yet somehow Democrats saying worse things is applauded.
Compare that to where actual violence is implied:
"If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere."
- Maxine Waters
"Go to the Hill today. Please, get up in the face of some congresspeople." - Cory Booker
"We owe the American people to be there for them, for their financial security, respecting the dignity and worth of every person in our country, and if there is some collateral damage for some others who do not share our view, well, so be it, but it shouldn’t be our original purpose." - Nancy Pelosi
If I convince you falsely and knowingly that someone has tortured and murdered your child and I tell you "we can't let that happen, the courts won't do anything, we have to fight much harder, he's at this restaurant right now, you should go" and you go and kill or maim that person, am I not responsible in your mind?
Falsely and knowingly doesn't enter into it. I've never seen a more fraudulent election in my life and I used to monitor elections in Africa for a living. Seriously, this was a steal that would make Robert Mugabe proud.
Come on now. The President and prominent republicans and their allies fanned enough flames by claiming election was stolen. Its not one speech or one instance, its the collective narrative thats been going around since the time it was clear that Trump is going to be on the losing side.
I used to oversee elections in the Third World and Nov 3, 2020 was the most fraudulent election in recorded history in my humble opinion. You are of course welcome to deny the overwhelming evidence of this but it won't make any difference to what happens in a few days time.
This is what it feels like to live in a country like China, where if you criticize the government, or question the dominant narrative, or call for regime change, you are called a "terrorist" and denied basic rights like expression and put on no-fly lists. Anti-government rhetoric is routinely suppressed, fire-walled, and forced out. Are you sure that is what you want?
And then when you take up arms and commit sedition you get to act all surprised that actions have consequences. The people who invaded the US Capitol building ARE TERRORISTS. Pure and simple. They should be put on no-fly lists and denied basic rights like the right to exist outside of a small cell (after they are tried and convicted for their crimes.)
This is what it feels like to live in a country which tries to uphold the rule of law. Sorry if it inconveniences you, but not sorry.
I absolutely agree that those who advocated for violent acts should be investigated and punished. Go after those authors on Parler. But shutting down an entire platform, which is used by lots of other people who are NOT violent, on the basis of some violent posts? You can find far worse content on Facebook, are you going to advocate shutting down the whole platform?
Facebook and Twitter do not have the violent posts solved by any measure. But at the very least they make the gestures and put money towards trying to fix it.
Parler has been vocal that they have no plans solving it. If they had at least showed some vague plan to resolve it, they would have earned some sympathy.
Did you see the images of these so called terrorists? They have committed an illegal act by trespassing on government property but to call them seditious terrorists is a bit too far fetched. They're a bunch of clowns who happened to storm the capitol.
I'm not American, but what I saw on my TV last week was an outgoing President organising an armed mob outside the seat of Government and inciting them to disrupt the democratic transition of power. There were people inside the building that were clearly intending to take hostages.
There was a gallows out the front.
In any other nation on earth, this was an attempted coup. Just because it failed doesn't mean that those involved didn't have intent.
Well, it was a very incompetent coup. If Trump really intended a coup, he should have had friendly military embedded among the rioters. He shouldn't have said "now go home". It's a very half-hearted coup on the part of the president.
Note well: I am far from saying that Trump is innocent. He absolutely should have known that his words would incite violence. In the most charitable light possible, he's still clueless about the effect his words would have. (I could kind of see his intent being to use the mob to pressure Congress, so that they would be inclined to see it Trump's way. He may have intended the mob surrounding the Capitol, but not the breach... in a very charitable interpretation. Even in that interpretation, though, he still very dangerously misjudged the effects of his words.)
And Trump may well be guilty of more than that. He may well be guilty of attempting a coup to remain in power, and just not have had any idea of how to do it right. (I prefer that rogues be incompetent...)
The Armed Forces [1], Capitol Police [2], and other law enforcement agencies around the country are investigating the participation of their members. It's going to take a while to sort everything out, but I'm betting it's more sinister than it appears give the gallows, flex cuffs, the former AF officers in tacticool gear, and the general rhetoric.
> If Trump really intended a coup, he should have had friendly military embedded among the rioters.
There were military personnel friendly to Trump among them.
> He shouldn't have said "now go home".
I may be confused on the timeline; wasn't that after members and electoral votes had been evacuated safely so the people overtly calling to execute the Speaker and VP, or otherwise plotting to capture, injure, or intimidate members, or destroy the electoral vote certificates to provide a pretext for their Congressional allies to resort to a vote-by-states in the absence of certified votes or to count the votes with selected states excluded had already failed?
Could be; I'm not sure. Still, at that point, saying "Go look in the House Office Building" (or wherever - I have no actual idea) would have been a better move for someone attempting an actual coup.
But a cynic could easily think that Trump could tell that sufficient force was arriving to stop the mob, and that cutting his losses was therefore his best option at that point, even if he were really trying to do a coup...
> They're a bunch of clowns who happened to storm the capitol.
Clowns who beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher, planted pipe bombs, and roamed the capitol with sidearms and zip ties to take hostages.
Not denying that part of the group became violent. They should absolutely charged with whatever crimes they committed. But a lot of the reaction to them is a coordinated theatre by the left to make it seem much much worse that it was. Part of the strategy to make things seem worse then they are is to use words like sedition, insurrection etc
They didn't "become" violent. It was an organized attempt to prevent the lawfully elected head of state from being certified and overthrow American democracy using violence.
Even the least violent among them committed a felony by entering the Capitol building. That someone else broke the window they entered doesn't make their entry any less illegal.
Inserrectionists who stormed the capitol to take Congress people hostage and stop the vote got distracted by posing for the cameras, taking selfies and casually enjoying themselves
> to take Congress people hostage and stop the vote got distracted by posing for the cameras, taking selfies and casually enjoying themselves
There's no contradiction there, despite your efforts to portray one.
People often take glee in and celebrate violence even as they commit it against others.
The german language has even given us a word for it: schadenfreude.
Thanks to the lies from the politicians and media personalities they follow, primarily the president, many of these people also fantastically believed that they were overturning a fraudulent election, and were therefore celebrating what they thought was an imminent success in that objective.
Some of my favorites are the little old lady carrying a little American flag, the people walking in a line between the roped off areas and the folks cleaning up after a couple of trash cans got overturned.
Seemed incredibly tame compared to the riots that went on over the summer that had massive amounts of looting and had buildings burnt to the ground.
I dunno. I think once you build a gallows, hang a noose on it,
and start chanting about hanging someone as you push against barricaded doors where that person is sheltering, tame is no longer is quite the right word.
Okay, sure, China is scary _but Parler was literally doing those things_. This was not some overreaction, this is not ostracizing mere disagreeing philosophies, this is not like Trump calling the media the enemy of the people. They literally were plotting kidnapping, murder, and sedition. This is an appropriate response.
There is a qualitative difference between concretely planning an attack and the things you describe. I am taking the platform's statements at face value, but what I understand is that they observed concrete, specific planning to coordinate a physical attack on US democratic institutions. In that sense, this is not about free speech at all. The actions taken were done with intent of preventing violence, not speech.
This is what it feels like to live in a country like China, where if you criticize the government, or question the dominant narrative, or call for regime change, you are called a "terrorist"
There's a big difference between criticizing the government and storming the capitol.
Talk all you want. Engage in constructive debate. Run for office. Change laws through the system. All of those things are OK in the United States.
Dragging a police officer down the stairs and beating him with a flag pole is not OK in the United States.
I was initially troubled by the booting of Parler, but I've come around to seeing AWS's position as similar to the payment processors who don't want to deal with porn sites. Doing business with some clients creates risks. Traditional players don't want to deal with risky clients, but there are specialized services who are willing to take them. However, they are more expensive for the same nominal service (because of the risks.) While the payment processors are dealing with frequent charge-backs, the risks I'd see in hosting Parler are more about liability and litigation.
There are clearly hosting providers (like Epik) who would be willing to take them on as clients from the start. If you read AWS's acceptable use policy, and then read the Parler's TOS, it is clear AWS was a terrible match as a hosting provider. By my read, AWS doesn't want to deal with anything that can be construed as "harmful" where Parler only forbade directly illegal behavior. (And it is apparent they barely felt a responsibility to moderate even to that level.) This was never going to work. Jan 6 brought things to a head, but as I see it, this business relationship was doomed from the start.
Please make your substantive points without posting in the flamewar style. We're trying to avoid the latter here because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for: curious, thoughtful conversation about interesting things.
When accounts build up a track record of flamewar, snark, political/ideological battle, and other things that break the site guidelines, we ban them. We have to, because otherwise this place will be engulfed by hellfire and then become scorched earth. Those things may be exciting and/or activating for a while, but they're not interesting.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site to heart, we'd be grateful. You can still express your views in that spirit, as many other HN users have been showing.
On one hand, Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. So it's no loss that it's gone, and it took far too long to deal with it. And just like I wouldn't bat an eye for AWS taking down an ISIS recruitment site, I don't really see any loss here.
On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?
Overall it feels like a legislative failure - in an ideal world, we have laws applied even handedly to deal with this. But in the absence of political will for these laws, what should be done? I think we are better off without Parler, but how can we do that in an even handed and consistent way?
I would agree - what's interesting to me is that taking Parler off the mainstream platforms like Google and Apple app stores though will probably only contribute to the radicalization of its content.
Essentially, these companies are probably just contributing to the thing they are against. But I guess so long as their hands aren't getting dirty they get to pretend like they're doing the right thing and taking the moral high ground.
They're not deciding what is acceptable speech. They're deciding what is acceptable speech for their platforms and services. And given how absolutely insane and extreme that speech became before they took action, it's just strange to look at these companies like they're a problem. They tolerated increasingly violent and hateful rhetoric until people literally stormed the Capitol, then took action against the worst offender that helped to plan violence against our elected officials. This isn't some theoretical case of billionaires imposing their worldviews by banning people that we should be tremendously fearful of.
> This isn't some theoretical case of billionaires imposing their worldviews by banning people that we should be tremendously fearful of.
I think you've missed the point. The concern OP raises is that this is no longer theoretical - these few billionaires actually can impose their worldview by controlling speech. In this case, we can all agree that Parler had to go. But the precedent / principle of the issue can be considered separately.
> They're not deciding what is acceptable speech. They're deciding what is acceptable speech for their platforms and services.
This is a distinction without a difference. If the major platforms all ban you, you are silenced. Its time we recognize the power these platforms have.
I disagree, there is an extreme difference there. Freedom of speech is specifically in regards to the government giving you the negative right of being able to say whatever you want without government prosecution (aside from some edge cases like direct threats and the like, which are closer to actual violence). What they do not do is guarantee you a platform. You are free to say whatever you like, but you are not owed the right to be listened to. Removing someone from a platform is not silencing them. A private company does not owe you anything, let alone service.
No. The first amendment is about the government. The concept of freedom of speech is broader. If in a pandemic I can only legally communicate via digital tools, and the billionaires running the digital tools all decide to ban me, I am silenced.
You're right, but the reality is that physical mail is no longer an effective form of communication relative to the speed of online platforms in most cases.
>the billionaires running the digital tools all decide to ban me, I am silenced.
How so? Are you incapable of using non-digital media to communicate? Are you incapable of creating your own digital platforms for communication or using alternative, less popular means to do so? Are you prevented from going to city hall, council meetings, political rallies, or voting? Your speech as it relates to your rights granted in the constitution remains completely intact. Your rights are unaffected by your access to certain digital platforms.
If you are on the no fly list of an airline, aren’t you free to buy your own B787, get a pilot license, get the relevant airport slots and authorisations and go fly by yourself anywhere you want? I mean in theory yes.
I support banning Parler, but this argument becomes more transparently untrue by the day. The internet is speech now. Visiting city halls and council meetings doesn't affect elections or policies, voting is useless without being part of an organized bloc, which can no longer happen without the internet, and Parler was one of several alt-right attempts to make their own platform--control of the internet is centralized enough that making a platform for non-technical users against the will of the megacorporations is not possible.
If you don't believe free speech absolutism should be allowed, say so, but free speech and this level of corporate dominance are not compatible.
I agree that corporations should be curtailed in both their size and power. This would resolve the paradox of speech being free, but it's platforms being controlled by a few large organizations. However, to say that free speech is absolute is absurd, because absolute free speech in this context would require the limitation of rights of organizations and owners too.
> However, to say that free speech is absolute is absurd, because absolute free speech in this context would require the limitation of rights of organizations and owners too.
If the first amendment and your concept of freedom of speech don't line up, then one or the other need to change I would think. If a right is not recognized by others/the government, then it effectively doesn't exist. That's not to say it's not right or that you couldn't rationally defend it though.
>If in a pandemic I can only legally communicate via digital tools
I see the conflict you're bringing up, it's in effect illegal to communicate in person a lot of the time due to the pandemic, so digital tools are very useful for you to be able to communicate, but if you are somehow banned from those you have few options, if any. I think the thing that is incorrect here is actually the government making it illegal to communicate via non-digital tools, even if a lot of times it is in an individual's best interest to stay inside. And once again, no one owes you a platform. You are, in your words, silenced, but I don't think that that is an issue that requires government action.
I think it could require government action: I could argue that it was government inaction in allowing a monopoly/oligopoly over the conduits of free speech that is now depriving me of my rights.
For what reason are we considering these platforms "conduits of free speech"? They are simply private services, private property. In the same way you can legally remove people from your home that you don't want in there, they can bar you from their service. They also didn't always exist. At what point in their existence would you argue that being banned from being able to use them was depriving you of some right? Can they have a monopoly over all of the "conduits of free speech" if all the old methods of communication still exist? If those alternatives exist, could they really be called a monopoly? (Although for things like Twitter, they're definitely not a monopoly, but if we're talking about govt backed ISPs, which can be a monopoly, then that is indeed a different story, but I would argue that ISPs should be divorced from any government regulation/subsidies).
"In the same way you can legally remove people from your home that you don't want in there" -> I agree with you in principle, but this is the type of thing where the principle doesn't generalize at every level of scale, and at a big enough scale it becomes problematic.
Let's consider the other extreme with a fictional corporation "MEGA INC", which suppose owns all web hosting, all ISPs. Let's also throw in that they have a monopoly over paper production and publishing. Now, do you think your argument that "this private entity can do whatever it wants" is problematic? I should hope so.
I'm not making the case that it's black/white and that this situation with Big Tech is equivalent to MEGA INC. But, it's not that our free speech rights are binary. My point is simply that we're somewhere along the spectrum spanning "private home" <-> "MEGA INC", and at this point rights are actually being diminished because of the oligopolistic nature of a significant corner where discourse happens.
So, unfortunately, I think it's a nuanced situation that's not easily reduced to a simplistic principle such as what you've stated. We have clear principles to reason about the extremes, but it's hard to make an argument in the hairy middle because both can be made to apply.
There's no shortage of conduits for free speech you have a right to use, on and off the internet.
The oligopoly only concerns distribution to the widest possible audience, whether it's social media or broadcast media. And even a First Amendment constrained government is allowed to pick and choose which speech it distributes
Utility companies are for all intents and purposes, governmental. Regulating social networks like utilities is one possible course of action our society could choose. But it is not how we do it today.
PG&E is a government-granted monopoly and is close to being part of the government itself (in that the government gets to decide how much profit the company is allowed to make, and insists they service every individual).
I can see the argument that basic Internet access should be similarly regulated, especially as it uses either public frequencies (e.g. 5G) or public land (sidewalks etc) to provide the service.
I agree that nobody's first amendment rights were violated. I maintain that big tech is controlling _acceptable speech_. All the major platforms are working together to decide what kind of speech society gets to hear, which is dangerous.
> What they do not do is guarantee you a platform.
I think this is a really important point. How I have framed this to others is: "the 6 o'clock news isn't required to give you airtime."
In the past, you could write articles to the newspaper, or contact the news and hope they picked up your story. There was not a right to be heard.
That said, I'm still not sure how I feel about what has transpired in the last week. Freedom of speech (as a principle, not in the US legal sense) has always felt like a core principle of the Internet.
> Its time we recognize the power these platforms have.
We have. That's why millions of people have pushed these companies to take a stand against hate. None of these companies are doing this because they want to lose money. If they thought it would be profitable long-term, they would keep doing it. It's the invisible hand of the market that you're really upset with here.
It's not their job to "take a stand against hate." I don't buy books from Amazon because I like their opinion on the homelessness situation in the world today. I don't ask my cashier at the grocery store his thoughts on gay marriage, and I don't expect corporations to do more than sell me goods I need.
The weird politicization of commerce is baffling to me.
Consumers using their collective economic power to push for change is not a new concept. I would suggest you take advantage of your willingness to buy books on Amazon if this is truly a baffling concept to you. Then read some of them.
Casual reminder that the slippery slope fallacy is ultimately a fallacy.
I think the issue isn't really controlled speech with these platforms but more often a loss of control of the narrative. They are ill-preppared to deal with hate speech and often will act as the very propagators of it. (See FB in 2016). The real issue to be found is the massive control they have in light of their blindness to the context of their product and inability to enact real censorship of things that are truly intolerant. Personally looking from the outside in, I think that makes them a long-term risk to themselves rather than just a risk to society. It's worth noting that this will likely lead to a platform that intentionally 'free' to intolerant behavior that will compete and likely compete well as it will be additive to those looking for hate.
AWS is more interesting in that case, though, since it's usually transparent to end users. AWS not doing business with Parler is a little like a craft store not selling posterboard and markers to a klansman, or a gun store not selling rounds to the guy who keeps talking about insurrection.
>gun store not selling rounds to the guy who keeps talking about insurrection
Yes, imagine a small town, and there's a guy known for always ranting about the coming insurrection, pedophile conspiracies, how "The Great Awakening" is near... then one day he walks into the town gun store and asks to buy a bunch of AR-15s and a ton of ammo, and the owner of the store says: "Hmm... no."
To elaborate on your point here, gun store owners choosing not to sell firearms to particular customers because they suspect those customers are a danger to themselves or others for any reason (including just the owners' hunch) is very commonplace, and not generally controversial.
From the letter AWS sent, a better analogy would be:
Craft store noticed their brand logo was on a poster board with messages calling for rape and execution of named individuals (a clearly illegal act). Craft store said in their sale recipt that the reserve the right to stop serving customers that promote illegal conduct.
First, however, the craft store asked the organizer to stop providing their poster boards to people organizing mass rape and execution event planning. "Please moderate, and you can continue to use our service"
The organizer days "go bleep yourself", to the store, followed by "if my members want to organize a mass execution of people, that's their protected speech!”
Store says "okay, your not welcome here anymore, see our terms of service"
AWS gave them a chance.. but at the end of the day, those messages calling for illegal acts are stored on AWS servers.. and Parler wanted to promote that kind of content to continue and amplify (it's good for business), but every day AWS is probably getting 50 warrants for information tied to having Parler as a customer. AWS service mark up doesn't cover 20 full time lawyers
I'll say if you're making this argument, then aws should be responsible for all content on aws servers. No hosting protections, direct responsibility. After all, the illegal data was on their servers, thus they should be directly responsible.
They are? They cooperate with law enforcement for illegal material takedowns on a regular basis. You might have heard of raids for botnet hosting, or if not those, the ones for child porn or movie piracy. AWS is absolutely committed to having no illegal activity on their servers.
> ...or a gun store not selling rounds to the guy who keeps talking about insurrection.
If he follows that up with "Allahu Akbar," do you expect the gun store to complete the sale, or call the feds? Is that a limit on "freedom of religion"?
Or if you go to buy a ton of fertilizer, and as they're loading it into your truck, you talk about blowing up the white house -- what do you think is gonna happen?
Modeling them as independent businesses that can decide — based on any non-protected principle they choose — to censor speech is too generic to be useful. They are closer to telephone or radio or broadcast TV companies than to private enterprise as an overarching category. Communication business are, of course, regulated around what they can and cannot say on air (the broadcast ones, specifically), and we probably need a similar approach to handling social media.
Yet we do not treat them like regulated broadcast media, which I guess is unsurprising in that regulation lags behind technology. In the context of Parler, it seems they tried to make the best of a bad situation.
But I don't know that we should cheer this as "the right outcome", even if, in this case, it seems justified (my gut is that this was the right thing to do, in this specific case). It's time to ask broader questions around whether these companies should have that power at all, or if we need government to step in.
I kind of feel the same as you. I'm happy that Parler is gone but on the other hand I think that Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter are monopolies and should be broken up.
I agree. I see a lot of people pushing to give them special status or make them town squares and I think that is the exact opposite solution we need. We should take anti-monopoly action and foster competition in their respective markets instead.
These are 4 different companies that compete with each other (Google Cloud vs. AWS and Facebook vs. Twitter, also although you didn't list it Apple vs. Google) in the spaces relevant to this conversation (cloud services, social media, and phone apps).
One can always list all the players in an industry and call that set "a monopoly and should be broken up". Or we can just take this for what it is, which is that some entity is so toxic that none of these companies (which compete with each other otherwise) want to touch it.
Google has monopoly on search, Amazon on online retail and to a lesser extent cloud hosting, Facebook on social media. Twitter on 140 character word dumps so that's maybe not at the same level bad as the others. Edit: Apple doesn't really have a monopoly on anything.
Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter are
monopolies and should be broken up.
Dominant market share != monopoly
For a monopoly, you need anticompetitive practices. Is Facebook unfairly preventing the success of other social networks? A good example of a monopoly was 90's era Microsoft, which prevented its OEMs from shipping competing operating systems.
Terminology aside, I completely agree with you that we need far, far more choice in the marketplace.
I don't think there's an easy answer. 2 possible solutions:
(1) deplatforming could be either a democratic process, or be challengeable through some kind of democratic process.
(2) deplatforming could be at the sole discretion of platforms, but the platforms themselves need to use open standards and protocols such that it is sufficiently easy for those who were deplatformed to switch to the opposition or self-platform (for example: ios allowing competing app stores). This would be difficult and technically challenging to enact in many situations (what does it mean in the case of social networks for example?), And if there's no competition we need antitrust ASAP
If all the competition are also deplatforming you, I think at a certain point it becomes fair to say that you were more or less democratically rejected, much like if every bar in town kicks out neo-nazis that's not a failure of free speech but a success of the free market. But that relies on a large, healthy, robust competitive ecosystem which does not exist in a billionaire-dominated tech scene.
> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?
No, because you don't need AWS or Twitter or Cloudflare or any of the name tech companies to run a high-traffic web site successfully.
Telecom companies are common carriers and do not have the luxury of being able to deny customers access if they are not breaking the law. Nothing preventing these people from starting up their own ISP and hosting company.
Nothing stopping them from fabricating their own silicon too, right? How far down this hole till we reach the bottom?
I wonder if this was the same sort of argument used to justify denying minorities homes / home loans? "Well they're free to build their own house!" "Well they're free to cut their own lumber!" "Well they're free to forge their own hammers!" "Well they're free to..."
Thank you for this example. I’ll be using it. I’ve been struggling to articulate that just because technically someone is free to do something doesn’t mean they aren’t being meaningfully hindered from doing it.
Denying people homes or loans because of race is vastly different, because one’s race is an inherited physical characteristic.[1] Here, companies are denying service to Parler based on the beliefs (edit: and behavior) of its users.
This situation lies somewhere between “refusing service based on someone’s religion” and “refusing service because I just don’t like them.” Political affiliation is not yet recognized as a religious belief, so they are not a protected class. I don’t know enough about the law to say on what grounds a company stands if they drop/refuse service because they think someone is being a dick.
[1] it’s more nuanced than that of course, but I’m speaking broadly here
Depends where in the world they are. But US carriers are nowhere near as fussy over who they supply unless their clients end up overwhelming their networks.
But you do need Google and Apple to have a mobile app.
I do agree with you that AWS dropping them isn't evidence of a monopoly. There's plenty of competitors in that space. None of them, however, are going to touch Parler with a 10ft pole at this point.
Like how they prevent people from getting the ISIS websites, Hamas websites, neo-Nazi web sites? Looks like they have more than a decade to do so and still nothing. Maybe your hyperbolic slippery slope argument is wrong?
Apple do it in certain degree. By makes their mobile browser extreme buggy and feature lacking. You don't even have proper notification support on it. How could it be used as a proper app? A social app that can't tell you that someone send a message to you sounds a no-go to me.
This is disingenuous. Already credit card companies have begun to de-platform people. Once Visa and AmEx refuse to do business with you, you are on increasingly thin ice. If both Google and Apple refuse to host your app in their App Stores, what exactly is your recourse?
Nowadays, the public square, the thing that the constitution is supposed to protect, which is the difference between feudalism and democracy, is de-facto (though not de-jure), owned by monopolistic corporations. They are only accountable to their shareholders, and they have nearly complete power over their platforms. The vast majority of public discourse, news and financial transactions take place on these feudal fiefdoms.
This is an oversight in the current legal framework, and will have to be corrected eventually.
> This is disingenuous. Already credit card companies have begun to de-platform people. Once Visa and AmEx refuse to do business with you, you are on increasingly thin ice. If both Google and Apple refuse to host your app in their App Stores, what exactly is your recourse?
Host on your own infrastructure. Present a mobile-responsive web site. Take Bitcoin.
(we're talking, politely, about free speech extremists - so none of this seems wildly inappropriate, right?)
I don't doubt that it could be used as a hint among other points, but doesn't that approach scream "tyranny of the mob"? How often in the past has a minority view been objectively right and a majority view been wrong? For example, Galileo was accused of heresy due to his belief that the Earth revolved around the sun. The "maybe that someone is the problem" view would say Galileo was the problem.
The free market argument is that it isn't tyranny of the mob. It's tyranny of the market. The companies are responding to market forces, which implies that so many people are concerned that it's actually a democratic push of people voting with their wallets.
Not my logic.
Refusing service to someone based on their sexual orientation, religion, or color of their skin is a very different moral proposition than refusing service based on facilitating the subversion of the democratically elected government that sustains said business.
Then add political affiliation as a protected class and prosecute people who break actual laws.
My personal opinion is that this discussion about tech, politics, censorship, etc. is something that needs to happen, and maybe all parties were completely within their rights to act how they did.
There are a lot of people who don't see that as self-evident, and what they are hearing is "if you are pro-Trump, you deserve to be a social pariah." That is a real quick path to radicalization.
Society is based on a set of mutually agreed upon rules. If you convince enough people through your actions that the rules are "Heads I win, Tails you lose", then they'll decide not to play by those rules anymore. And then all hell breaks loose.
> Society is based on a set of mutually agreed upon rules.
Agreed, and it follows from that that "political affiliation" protection cannot include "wants to destroy the government" -- no matter from what quadrant that sentiment flows (anarchist, socialist, fascist, whatever).
Agreeing to democracy -- and probably republicanism -- (note, both lowercase) is a bright line across which you've really decided to step outside of our mutual rules.
Neither "conservatives", "republicans", nor any other actual political affiliation are being shut out by any of these companies.
People who affiliate with "opposing a democratic election with direct violence" are.
> People who affiliate with "opposing a democratic election with direct violence" are.
The trouble is that many of the same people saying these actions were perfectly acceptable also have a habit of casually stating that all people who voted for Trump are the irredeemable scum of the earth.
> Nowadays, the public square, the thing that the constitution is supposed to protect, which is the difference between feudalism and democracy, is de-facto (though not de-jure), owned by monopolistic corporations.
That's quite the exaggeration. You can quite literally still gather in a physical public square. Just because it's more convenient to do so online doesn't mean it's a granted right.
> The vast majority of public discourse, news and financial transactions take place on these feudal fiefdoms.
And? If a bank decides they don't want you as a customer, you can still perform cash transactions. You aren't entitled to a bank account just because the majority of people do banking.
Also, what Parler was doing was not so much "gathering in the public square" as they were renting a storefront in a privately owned mall. The mall owners are well within their rights to evict the tenant.
> You can quite literally still gather in a physical public square.
You can? Last I checked I can't, if I do that I get arrested for breaking social distancing...
> you can still perform cash transactions.
You mean, like in Japan and Sweden, that decided to attempt to go cashless by creating more and more rules on cash so that only debit (or credit) cards are practical?
That’s quite a pedantic interpretation of gathering in a public square at a particular moment in time where doing so is detrimental to the health and economy of a community. In the event that you’re not disingenuously asking that question, as with all things, “it depends”, on specific local ordinance, how many people, the ability to maintain six feet distance, etc.
> Already credit card companies have begun to de-platform people.
For a while now. Sex workers, sex shops have complained about it for years. Nobody cared. I find it ironic that the same group of people advocating against consumer and worker protections now seem to demand them.
It's tempting to think that it's concern trolling by fascists, really. No interest in whether Google wants to get rid of a high-profile AI ethicist, because hey, it's a private company. No interest in Facebook censoring breastfeeding groups because OMG NIPPLE. No interest in, as you say, making it impossible for legal sex work to operate. No complaints that Apple forbid R18 material in the app store years ago because Steve Jobs didn't like it.
Now, suddenly, it's a great big issue because a bunch of neo-Nazis got run out of town? Not a great look, eh.
Gonna disagree there a bit, semantically. Parler was a no-censorship social site, open to everyone. Extreme right-wing people flocked to it while very few people with other perspectives did. Parler being a hate site was not purely of their making, but rather a result of society's bias toward silencing opposing views. We need more people like Daryl Davis (a black jass musician who has converted hundreds of KKK members through kindness and friendship and music) so that censorship seems less and less like a good idea.
I'm not surprised at the end result, but the effort to retain free speech was a valiant one. Forcing extremist views underground doesn't silence them, it emboldens them and makes it harder to know what they're up to. Not a good idea.
Parler was moderated, and it was explicitly moderated for coherence with a right-wing/reactionary viewpoint. It was not a neutral, unfiltered platform.
I think your statement is the reverse of what was implied.
Doesn't libertarianism posit a weak central government, shedding all responsibilities (that can be shed) to the free market, where competition ensures the best outcomes, choices for all, etc?
If that's true, the current situation of wealthy corporations controlling various social media platforms is... the desired outcome?
The fact that competition is better in areas such as motor vehicles, due to physical standards like roads that work for everyone, lack of network effects, and so on, is beside the point. It isn't the government's fault that Orkut and MySpace didn't compete well against Facebook, or that Parler entered a service contract with another corporation that decided their TOS was violated.
This will all be sorted out in the courts, interpreting contracts which are the ultimate source of truth in the libertarian world view. Fear nothing, justice will prevail. If Parler was not in violation of the contract, they will be compensated. If they were, too bad, they failed to adhere to the contract they agreed to. They deserve to fail and the NEXT competitor to take up the mantle will have incrementally better information and chances to succeed.
That's like saying "Humans produce carbon dioxide, cars produce carbon dioxide, lets study human anatomy to learn how cars work".
OP's statement of "this is what we get" strongly implies that the current state of things is somehow the result of libertarian policies.
There is nothing libertarian about our government. That's why I bring up the extremely high spending and unjust laws we have. Blaming libertarianism for anything happening in the world requires some serious mental gymnastics.
China also has large corporations, should we blame libertarianism for all the human rights offences happening there?
It might not make you a communist, but I'd say definitely a statist at least, of which there are both left and right leaning flavors.
If libertarianism and individualism are "a cancer" and "literal poison" then then they are the most benign and beneficial ones I've ever heard of. Of course any ideology has a spectrum of interpretations and people involved, but the core ideas of "don't hurt people and don't take their stuff" (and maybe also "leave me alone") seem pretty good to me.
Can't you disagree with a philosophy without calling it a cancer? It's this warping of language, 1984-style as in the original comment, that is the biggest problem.
Please stop posting political battle comments and flamebait to HN. This kind of dross is what's destroying this site, and we have to ban accounts that do that.
Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological flamewar. It's tedious, extremely repetitive, and invariably turns nasty. It's not what this site is for and it destroys what it is for.
I’m in the US, and old enough to remember the time before the Internet, and that’s what I remember. You had three or so TV networks and a handful of national magazines and newspapers. Big tech isn’t really any different from the media zeitgeist I grew up with.
It’s just the last 20 years or so of everybody having a megaphone that is outside the norm.
It is very different. Everyone saw the same or very similar information on the TV. People watching the same channels would see the exact same thing.
With social media, your feed is perfectly catered to you as an individual, by using as much data on you as they can get their hands on, and a nearly endless supply of content from the "megaphones" of other users. Even if you have many of the same friends as someone, and politically align with them, you probably would find scrolling through their feed to be less interesting than scrolling through your own.
> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?
I think it's fine to be concerned about the principle while in agreement on this use. Both things can be true.
And FWIW, that's the state in which I find myself. The president used Twitter to promote lies about the election that were consumed by his followers who then used social media to plan and execute violence in the US capitol. When that same cycle threatened to repeat, these companies stepped in. Good for them, what was their other choice?
But appropriate action in this case does not mean that the process and standards used are OK in the arbitrary case and completely agree that lack of legislative standards is the problem. The tech companies had not good choices here because as a society we've not yet set any reasonable rules.
This same power has been used, on a less dramatic scale over the past year and for a long time before now, to attack police reform activists and disrupt organizing of the local activist communities that exist to oppose this shit on the ground.
It's not really a situation of "this may be socially chilling", it's been happening, and now it's just the first time they contravened the president and made the news cycle.
I don't really see any other decision they could have made this past week. But if social media and capital in general would stop kneecapping every political option but ineffective liberalism and dogwhistle fascism, maybe the large numbers of people who are angry and feel helpless would currently have a pressure valve in a healthier direction.
Three or four massive companies with incentives to suppress the slightest disruption to profit, that hold unprecedented surveillance power, and exercise detailed control over individual and mass communication, that make apparently ideological decisions about who is allowed to exist online, are not compatible with a healthy society or any path that could lead us out of this situation.
"Opposing this shit on the ground" is why we're in this nightmare in the first place. Imagine if there had been counterprotestors "opposing this shit on the ground" at the Capitol insurrection: we'd probably be pretty fucking close to a civil war right now instead of near universal condemnation of the extremist forces.
If you have anything to do with "opposing this shit on the ground", please fucking stop. You are accomplishing less than nothing.
The constitution prohibits the government from banning political speech unless it will, e.g. incite imminent violence. Keyword being imminent. Merely supporting violence in general and non-specific terms is not illegal and cannot be made illegal under the constitution, so the government cannot decide to ban most of the types of speech that the tech companies have chosen to ban (including Trump's recent tweets that got him banned).
If you think it is good that the recent bans took place then you have no choice but to delegate decision making authority to the industry, because the government is not constitutionally permitted to demand that tech companies make those decisions.
I guess it’s theoretically possible to set up an arm of law enforcement whose sole job would be to monitor all social media, along with a judicial division that could stand at the ready to issue court orders for comment takedowns. Maybe.
>>I guess it’s theoretically possible to set up an arm of law enforcement whose sole job would be to monitor all social media, along with a judicial division that could stand at the ready to issue court orders for comment takedowns
And the US government should bring a case against them. I don't think you'll find me inconsistent in that thought, I also argued an ISP yesterday that blocked FB is fully within its rights to do so.
Personally I think we need anti-trust action against a lot of larger tech companies and second that they have now opened the door on further regulation regarding content moderation. I think getting rid of Section 230 entirely would be a mistake but I won't be surprised to see it amended in some form.
Never mind plain old lobbying, any legislator who supports a crackdown on Facebook could be de-platformed. These tech leviathans have captured the regulators in a way that has never been seen before, and now they are flaunting grotesque anti-competitive bullying in all of our faces. Depending on the government to fix this mess is not going to go well.
I believe the distinction between the two (though note: I am very willing to change this belief based on learning details I don't currently know) is that Facebook tries to remove such content (though it may not perfectly succeed) whereas Parler actively refused to do so when AWS made them aware and asked them to remove it.
This is one reason why amazon pulled the plug and the violent posts were "rapidly growing". This kind of customer is probably a huge headache to deal with, and complaints were being sent/forwarded from amazon and "some" were acted on.
Amazon said:
"It's clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t "feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform." This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts."
From an optics point of view, if it looked like they were handling all users the same way, there'd be so much less of a problem here. But right now, it is like selective law enforcement -- action will be taken if we don't like you, much more than whether you are deemed to be complying with the terms of service.
What they could've done is consistently enforced their rules all the way along, to people of all political persuasions.
Is there evidence that there are other AWS customers with easily discoverable content that incites violence, which AWS is not working to have removed due to their terms of service?
I find the phrase “incite violence” to be a deceptive term to use.
A threat of violence is a very defined term. Both legally and in common understanding.
“Incites violence” is vague and takes the responsibility away from the one conducting violence, and places it on somebody else who may or may not have been promoting violence. It’s usage is not defined legally or in common usage.
“Barney is the worst dinosaur” could be “inciting violence” if somebody attacked the purple children’s mascot.
Should we have to mute ourselves because crazy people might use our words as justification for their madness?
Should others censor my opinions because in their opinion, a third party might use my words for justification for their madness?
The usage I’m seeing does not fit the below defined criteria:
The speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” AND
The speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
I personally believe the posts Amazon asked to have taken down meet the Brandenburg test, but note that Amazon is not beholden to apply the legal test, though I do believe it is a good starting point. Another reason to take things down is "glorification of terrorism", which I believe also applies to some of the posts.
People rioting under the guise of "antifa" killed innocent people in Portland. They even bombed a court house. There's videos of "antifa" who tried to molotov police but accidentally self-immolated instead. It's a meme that the media will call these "peaceful protests".
As someone who has no dog in the race, and hates violence -- is this "fake news"?? Do these rabid maga idiots actually have a point?
If these protests were organized using FB or Twitter then why aren't they also removed from the app stores?
FB profited from radicalizing people using "engagement metrics" and machine learning at a massive scale just to sell ads. Now they want to wash their hands clean?
These billionaires weren't democratically elected and they shouldn't be shaping our democracy.
If there was a social network whose primary objective was to promote these actions, then sure.
As it happens, these actions are not coordinated en masse, are neither promoted nor supported by even the vast majority of people who are supposedly aligned ideologically with is perpetrators, and are not organized in spaces mostly devoted to that purpose.
I was actually in Seattle while similar protests occured, and seeing things myself, I can say that the media did mis-portray things greatly. 99% of the protestors were completely peaceful and tens of thousands of people rallied to protest day over day all peacefully. I was surprised the media coverage didn't really cover those much, it chose to focus on like the single instance of a car lit on fire at 3am and those very minor instances, sometimes the media photoshopped images too, where they'd like superimpose a person holding a weapon in front of the photo of the car on fire and things like that. And I mean all media, left-wing, right-wing, small media, big media, like they all did this, which I was very surprised about.
I felt pretty safe for the most part, when people weren't protesting I'd still go and have coffee and order croissant at my favourite places in the area that was "occupied".
Things got scary when "anti-protester" started showing up, and suddenly everyone felt like people would show up with guns so protesters felt they needed guns too, and then there was this weird tension of like why we all have guns?
I was really surprised personally at the intensity of the police response, especially in the beginning, and to me it felt like the police really escalated tensions early on which is what led to protesters starting to bring fireworks and umbrellas to protect themselves from police "croud control". Like if a single person in the croud threw a single bottle that was enough for the police to just start pepper spraying and tear gazing everyone. I always wondered why the police doesn't just go after that person that threw a bottle or broke a window, I'm not sure what justified all this collateral damage from them. There were kids and moms and even handicapped people at a lot of those protests.
Most striking is the way the police organises around protesters, even though the protests are peaceful, they flank the croud, and really position themselves like the police and protesters are about to have a Braveheart style face off. I don't understand why the police doesn't spread themselves through the croud and instead help keep the protest peaceful by deterring the few people who are there to cause raucous. They should focus on the people disrupting the protests, help protect others from them, and arrest those.
I was just really surprised by that, because if there was a parade, the police would do what I'm describing, but for a protest it seems they treat the protesters like a huge threat and that makes the whole thing really tense and makes people feel like the police is actually against them. It didn't help that the protesters were there to protest police brutality and they were welcomed by more police brutality and confrontation.
What I really want people to focus on here is this fact, I'm from Montreal, where we take Hockey seriously, and when the team Wins or Loses at the final, police cars are lit on fire, windows are smashed, while people celebrate the victory to the street or morn the loss of our hockey team!
Now in Seattle, you had 60000!! Yes I said Sixty Thousand!!! PEOPLE marching an entire day completely peacefully without a single broken window or fire: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/thousands-march-in... when the population of the whole city is 600000. That means 1 in 10 people participated in this protest, and there were not even minor raucous! That&#...
> What I really want people to focus on here is this fact, I'm from Montreal, where we take Hockey seriously, and when the team Wins or Loses at the final, police cars are lit on fire, windows are smashed, while people celebrate the victory to the street or morn the loss of our hockey team!
Happens in almost every city I've ever lived in. I've seen far more violence at a Los Angeles Lakers or San Francisco Giants riots after they win a championship than at my local BLM protests.
Is this responsive to my comment? I am asking whether there are examples of posts of the kind that Amazon asked Parler to take down (clear incitement to violence / glorification of terrorism), which another service hosted on AWS has refused to take down when made aware of them? I don't know whether there are or aren't, which is why I'm asking. Your comment does not answer this question.
If I link you to examples of people with blue checkmarks calling for violence then what? Would you support twitter becoming deplatformed? Is principled based reasoning something you're capable of or even interested in?
> You're continuing to demonstrate that if I answer your questions it has no bearing on your ideology.
Again, how am I demonstrating that? I honestly can't see anyway that you have any idea what I think, from my comments in this thread, without just completely making up a projection out of whole cloth.
> Now you want to know if Twitter has an active account with AWS. I could answer that. But does it matter?
It does seem to matter, when the question is "should AWS stop hosting Twitter because of the way in which they moderate their content?". AWS can't do that if Twitter is not hosted on AWS... So I fail to see how it doesn't matter.
To answer what I think your original question was, filling in assumptions for my (still unanswered...) questions: if Twitter is hosted on AWS, and if AWS notifies them of content they are hosting with AWS that violates the AWS terms, and Twitter refuses to remove that content, then yes, I believe AWS is within their rights to suspend Twitter's account.
And Hillary Clinton was, for years, claiming the election was “stolen” from her. “Stolen” is her word, not mine. Is she not responsible for whipping people into a frenzy over election integrity?
10 Democrat congresspeople objected to the electoral count in 2016, including Sheila Jackson-Lee challenged the electoral count in 2016. That they didn’t get a Senator to also challenge doesn’t change their own opposition to the election. Is Shiela Jackson-Lee deplatformed? Or course not. She’s a member of the congressional black caucus. She, an violence-promoting Maxine Waters get a pass from the hand-wringing of the tech and leftist “elites.”
People on the left are gigantic hypocrites. And liars. Conveniently ascribing to Trump what they have been doing since before November 2016. There are hundreds of not thousands of examples of outright hypocrisy.
Another example: violence committed against Senator Rand Paul was cheered by Twitter users. Accounts weren’t purged, nor users banned en mass. The assassination attempt of Congressman Scalise — no punishment of Bernie Sanders’ campaign for inspiring hatred of Republicans that led to a self proclaimed “Bernie Bro” from firing over 50 shots in an attempt to kill Republicans.
Where is the “community standards” enforcement around people on Twitter that celebrate this actual violence against elected officials?
Hypocrites and phonies. That’s what the tech “elites” and leftist are.
This is a false equivalence. The clearest reason is that zero of these cases resulted in sedition. This argument is distracting, it is classic whataboutism. In no way is it the case that moderating the app stores and shutting down access to Parler or the President's Tweets equivalent to condoning Clinton's or Jackson-Lee's or Sander's actions. I recommend that you look at this particular case and draw your conclusions about it without complaining about the failure to respond the same way to very different situations from other people years prior.
I'd like to see the evidence of how violent actions by pro-DNC parties like BLM/antifa which occurred after these words are any less tied to them than the actions that happened after Trump's words. For empirical data's sake.
Other than the President giving an in person speech before this exact group of people on the same morning as the events took place in which he directed them to march toward the Capitol building?
During: President begins speech at approximately noon. Some protestors already amassed at Capitol. During speech, crowd begins moving away from the speech location, gather at the Capitol building, and breach outer perimeter “bike fence”.
After: The President’s speech ends at approximately 1:10pm. Crowd is still outside the Capitol doors. Congress begins certifying the vote. Protestors clash with police, both sides spraying chemical irritants.
Protesters continue to gather in numbers, surrounding the Capitol building until breaching the exterior doors at approximately 2:10pm.
Other than the planting of pipe bombs at the Capitol/RNC/DNC (which I haven’t seen reporting on the timing), all significant violence took place shortly after the President’s speech ended.
As per Wikipedia: "A majority of developed democracies have laws that restrict hate speech, including Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, South Africa, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom."
The Unites States is not in that list. Hence it is more vulnerable to problems associated with allowing hate speech (i.e. incitement of violence by foreign-state actors, etc.).
Companies that operate on the global markets tend to operate with the standards that are acceptable globally. In particular: "On 31 May 2016, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, jointly agreed to a European Union code of conduct obligating them to review "[the] majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech" posted on their services within 24 hours."
So in that particular case, influence of these companies might be bringing United States closer to best practices adopted in the majority of developed democracies.
> So in that particular case, influence of these companies might be bringing United States closer to best practices adopted in the majority of developed democracies.
Best practices for maintaining a democracy or best practices for maintaining social order? There's a difference. You might argue that restricting hate speech is actually a step away from democracy towards more government control.
You can look at the following parameters that are critical for the health of democracies: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture.
And consider how moderation of hate speech affects these parameters. Evaluating these on an example of presidential debates of 2020 might be a good option. As there is a contrast between the first debate, that included no moderation and a second debate, that included some.
This was my attitude too until about 3 years ago. But we're dealing with a group of people who genuinely believe that Trump is saving the world from a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles, and if Biden becomes president they'll all be carted off to FEMA camps. How do you reason with someone like that?
> If they are lies then why can't they be refuted instead of suppressed?
It's harder to refute lies in the marketplace of ideas if everyone with a megaphone is obligated to echo them. Perhaps this wouldn't be true if people were perfectly rational, but if people were perfectly rational they wouldn't be believing and spreading lies in the first place.
>Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage which emphasizes the difficulty of debunking bullshit: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
It's one thing if I say the election was stolen. I should not be censored for saying that it was. My voice alone will not sway anything. The problem is that so much power is concentrated with the president that it ONLY takes his voice to throw an entire country into chaos. That's too much power with one person.
So what am I saying? That I should have freedoms the president should not?
Well, the USA could impeach and remove that person, or they could reduce the power of his office. But so far the people and their elected representatives have opted not to do either of those things.
> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?
I think this question conflates "private company exercises right to refuse service" and "private company decides what's acceptable speech". The internet is not truly centralized and no tech giant has a monopoly on speech. There remains plenty of internet real estate to host ideas on that's not owned by tech giants. I think it should remain the right of these companies not to do business with organizations they choose not to and that said organization should also have the right to find another provider who will do business with them (or create their own if need be).
Is this not basically the same as porn hosting? There are hosts who don't want to be associated with it, and there are hosts who have no qualms taking porn money.
Google and Apple have a duopoly on mobile platforms, which are the natural place for any communication app. If those two act in concert you are facing a monopoly. There are only two ways out. Competition or regulation.
For AWS, I agree there are many alternatives, and in fact what shocked me wasn’t so much that they terminated their contract with Parler, but the fact that they seem to have done so with zero notice period. Which I find extremely cavalier.
Up to a certain point. No amount of money would prevent congress from toughening bank regulations after the financial crisis. I also doubt that the republicans are going to give big tech companies a pass when they come back to power.
You can't get an OnlyFans app in Google or Apple's app stores either, much as I'm sure the company in question would like the exposure of having one, because much of that website's user generated content also falls foul of Google and Apple's content policies. I don't understand what appears to be a commonly held view that it was fine for the appstore duopoly to deem content unsuitable for their store until the content in question was calls to hang the vice president and shitposts about Jews.
Yeah, I think that both of those things should probably have more public input when the players at hand effectively control the entire market for smartphones in the US.
We have strong bill of rights restrictions on governmental power because of the massive amount of power held by the government. So having that power be controlled by small numbers of entirely unaccountable figures with more power than the government in certain areas doesn't seem better at all?
I think the main thing is if you want to make a case for there being anti-trust or user freedom or dubious moderation priorities issues with app stores, a campaign centred around examples other than Parler is much more likely to win widespread support.
Market share is low, but there certainly are other mobile OS options out there. The fact that people in general don't want to use them doesn't make Android & iOS a "duopoly".
This line of thinking is similar to what happened in the deep south before the civil rights movement. Private businesses didn't want to serve African Americans and the excuse given was its their right to refuse service. Except when all private businesses colluded to deny service to African Americans to enforce an informal segregation.
Eventually the federal government came in and decided race was a protected class.
Obviously the problem isn't as simple as saying Google or anyone else must allow certain groups to use their platforms. Because that compels speech. Which the government also can't do.
Proper legal experts would have to craft it but I think the limit should be somewhere around access and use of the infrastructure. Domain registrars and hosts cannot discriminate. However If Twitter doesn't want someone on their platform I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to kick them. We just cant allow for those paltform hosts to collude with the infrastructure providers to deplatform others completely.
And I can think of two reasons why from a legal standpoint. 1: most of the internet infrastructure in the US was built with public dollars. Even if its nominally owned by a private ISP, they were paid by the government to build it. Historically the courts have used government funds as a way to enforce legal limits.
2: coordinated deplatforming like what happened with Parlor looks an awful lot like it was an intentional hit to take out a potential competitor to the current online status quo. That should worry everyone really.
With a Parler, the dependence on aws, twilio, and other solutions took them out of the iaas world and into paas and saas. They depended on Amazon and other vendor solutions, so migrating to anything else would be almost impossible.
No one cried like this when Stormfront was taken down. These "Libertarian" Ayn Rand type morons just dressed up the white supremacy in a hipster tie and beard and suddenly its all about free speech.
1. Probably. Take a look at some of the Parker dumps before it was shut down. Calls for death squads weren't couched in metaphor.
2. Even if not, Twitter, as much as I loathe it, also has many non-hateful users. Parler was a haven for alt-right extremism.
Anybody who has ever talked about housing on Twitter or Facebook knows that pictures of Mao and guillotines frequently accompany calls to kill all landlords (just to take one example I'm familiar with).
Are these legitimate calls to violence? Or just jokey memes? Is there a difference? Who decides that? In what sense do these posts not demonstrate support for political violence?
In the case of Parler, it turned out that yes, the calls to violence were real and not jokes.
You might say all these platforms previously gave Parler the benefit of the doubt and then were faced with incontrovertible evidence that Parler was facilitating political violence.
> This is a question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that Parler had more “hate” than Twitter, etc.?
The problem isn't just that they had more, though logic would suggest they did; after all, their user base are refugees from other platforms that pushed them out for extremist language, advocating for violence, conspiracy theories, etc.
It's that Parler refused to remove it.
So even if the rate of introduction of this content was the same on Parler (which I don't buy for a second, see argument above), the total concentration and visibility of it is higher because it's not taken down.
i imagine twitter has more in absolute terms, just due to the relative size of the two sites. I think the major difference is worse than just refusing to remove it, Parler advertised itself as the place where you can say things that most sites would moderate away, it actively encouraged it, so as a percentage it was much larger
It's hard to quantify, but I can provide an example of a specific post that likely wouldn't have stayed up on twitter:
"Everyone said Pence sold out!!! Time to enter the capitol. Go patriots. Echo and enter the building dont let them vote. Put pressure. We are riding in!!! Echo big"
That said, I still don't support taking down a site because there's no moderation. These people won't go away; I wonder if decentralized/p2p technologies will see more adoption by the radical right for this reason.
> I wonder if decentralized/p2p technologies will see more adoption by the radical right for this reason.
It seems as though there is in inverse relationship between ease of use and centralization (obviously). As communication becomes decentralized, the ability to accrue a large audience becomes more difficult. This supports the rise of ideas that can gain widespread support on their merit, as opposed to gaining widespread support via having a mass audience to start with.
To illustrate: on one side, we have a centralized extreme: Twitter (or Reddit, or Facebook). On the other side we have a decentralized extreme: spoken word. Which is easier to radicalize a country with?
If extremists move to decentralized or p2p alternatives to social media, they will shrink in the long run, letting the fringe ideas remain on the fringe.
If all social media went the way of decentralization, we would see far less extremism in general, simply because most people wouldn't go looking for it and it's pretty hard to spread extremist ideas in a one-on-one conversation.
Right. So a somewhat rough analysis would be: sample a range of "average" tweets on both platform and somehow aggregate an average "hate" value.
What I'm getting at is, I understand Parler is generally a right-leaning platform, and therefore the types of "hate" will be right-leaning. Twitter is a generally left-leaning platform, so I would expect their type of hate to be generally left-leaning. So I think a tweet about storming the capitol isn't good evidence that Twitter is better. Because, for exmaple, perhaps a violent Antifa tweet would be left alone on Twitter but moderated in Parler. Perhaps some ML bot can quantity sentiment of tweets.
Others have mentioned it, but there is a multi-TB dump of parler posts and videos out there if you feel like digging. In addition to the widely recognized fact that hate speech and outright calls to political violence were tolerated on Parler we have evidence that what little moderation did exist on the platform was dedicated towards suppressing dissenting opinions and reinforcing the Trump viewpoint. As an absolute number Parler probably had fewer objectionable messages, but they were a much larger percentage of the whole and unlike on Twitter there was no moderation that was preventing them from being distributed.
I believe that once any social media site gets big enough people with radical and violent views show up. It's unavoidable. Some of them are just trolls and troublemakers. The real question becomes how they deal with those people. Parler already had a moderation policy in-place, but to be fair they are a growing company that experienced an absolute surge of new users. Twitter is a fully mature company with much more moderation in place. Even still, you can find a ton of calls for violence on Twitter by blue checkmark people and nothing ever seems to come from that.
Just because radical things are posted on your website doesn't mean all the discourse on the site is bad and your site should be deplatformed. We already apply that standard to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others.
As a side note, I've heard that the people who actually stormed the Capitol Building (not just holding signs outside of it, which is perfectly fine) used Facebook to coordinate and not Parler.
A policy that was FAR more relaxed than any of their competitors, which was by design and part of their marketing pitch: come here to say those things you're not allowed to say elsewhere.
Parler's position is: unless the language is strictly illegal according to the letter of the law that's designed limit government censorship of speech, then it's allowed.
By that definition, if I call for someone's death, unless I have the means and the opportunity and mention a specific time, then it doesn't count and the post stays up.
Clearly Amazon, Google, and Apple have policies that are more strict than US law. And that makes sense: US law is shaped by the constitution, which is meant to restrict the government's ability to limit speech. And we should absolutely want the rules regarding government censorship to be as narrow as possible.
But private services are free to operate by different rules.
For example, if I walk into a McDonalds and start swearing at all the customers, I'll get kicked out even if I'm not breaking the letter of the law.
So, did they have a moderation policy? Yes, technically. But did that policy allow extremist and violent language to persist on their site at a level above and beyond what's seen on any competing platform outside of, say, 8chan? Absolutely.
> As a side note, I've heard that the people who actually stormed the Capitol Building (not just holding signs outside of it, which is perfectly fine) used Facebook to coordinate and not Parler.
And Facebook would pull that content down if they found it.
Parler won't.
That's what got them pulled from AWS, and the Google and Apple app stores.
"But private services are free to operate by different rules."
But that's just it, isn't it? Parler tried to make a new service that plays by a new set of rules. And they were crushed, because it turns out that you actually can't have your own rules unless you are already at the scale of Apple, AWS, etc.
I didn't say it was illegal or an infringement of Constitutional rights. But it is pretty worrying.
Before this, the power was somewhat theoretical and used in tiny marginal cases. Now, it's proven that they can effectively exercise the power in a major way, and that's news.
> Now, it's proven that they can effectively exercise the power in a major way, and that's news.
Honestly, it's really not. We've seen groups like ISIS kicked off social media, for example, and no one blinked an eye. Heck, Milo Yiannopoulos was deplatformed way back in 2016.
The thing that's news is that a significant percentage of a major US political party is now associated with a form of right wing extremism and wrapped up in a major conspiracy theory movement whose adherents are willing to commit violence in an attempt to subvert an election.
> But that's just it, isn't it? Parler tried to make a new service that plays by a new set of rules. And they were crushed, because it turns out that you actually can't have your own rules unless you are already at the scale of Apple, AWS, etc.
That's not at all true. If I recall the same thing happened to 8chan/8kun. Yet somehow they live on. If Parler has a market, they'll find a way.
That said, it sucks but, well, that's capitalism for ya.
What else would you suggest? Regulating these various companies such that the government gets to decide who can use their services?
Because if so, a) that would require new laws, b) it'd probably fall afoul of the first amendment, and c) it doesn't seem to align well with free market conservative ideology, and so should be opposed by the very users of Parler that are being affected by this.
It perfectly valid for you to dismiss my account as anecdotal because admittedly that's all it is.
But man, wow. I joined Parler several months ago and that's literally all my default feed was -- various flavors of right wing rage. Not all was violent or racist. Some were verified celebrities and right wing politicians; those tended to be rather mild.
But typing various slurs or words like "shoot" or "hang" into the search box returned some eye-watering results.
The difference between it and Twitter was not subtle.
This is another question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that you're not knowingly asking that as a political/debating tactic to suggest your proposition is reasonable, knowing full well that the purpose of Parler's existence is (was) to facilitate communication that larger social networks stifle, and categorize as hate speech?
I think it's very interesting that you lead off citing good faith in a situation where, in my experience, you're about to demonstrate literal bad faith. It's like you wish to take off the table the interpretation that you are intentionally lying for the sake of argument.
God forbid anyone wants to discuss anything "that the larger social networks stifle, and categorize as hate speech". Anyone that expresses such a desire is guilty of hate speech and must be silenced.
> that larger social networks stifle, and categorize as hate speech?
Let me fix that:
> that multiple countries and international organizations categorize as hate speech?
A casual reminder that when most think these open air rules are intended to stifle conversation it is generally for very clear legal and moral reasons. If you believe this is used by them to control people then you should also believe that a replacement should view this speech as antithetical to the existence of the free speech social company.
It's one thing to ban talk about the platform you are talking on.
It's not the same thing to ban intolerant behavior.
I've seen this argument so many times, and it always strikes me that those who cite it often have either not read, or completely miss the point Karl Popper was trying to make. He goes so far as to even say: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." I am quite sick of the usage of the paradox of tolerance being used as an attack against a free, pluralistic society.
Clearly you didn't quote the rest of that exact line for a reason.
He goes on to explain what situation would call for use of suppression, for example, the use of violence or rejecting reason or logic by the intolerant (Which, obviously both are what happened in January 6th and in this narrative) ;)
The ban isn't on conservative viewpoints, it is on intolerant speech that has no want to make a logical discussion and resorts to violence. Trust me, I'm using it correctly.
The funny thing about intolerance is that it's pretty easy to define:
Unwillingness to accept(or tolerate) views, beliefs, or behavior that differ from one's own.
When we talk about intolerant behavior we are talking about actions and statements that are intended to demean others by design (and praise the inverse), this is pretty easy to define. Saying that a person's skin color or gender makes them lesser or to be despised is clearly intolerant, the person in context is clearly unable to change this as it is how they are. Whats funny about this is that the US Bill of rights is a statement on intolerance by design. It's meant to both give rights but also set tone.
> This is another question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that you're not knowingly asking that as a political/debating tactic to suggest your proposition is reasonable, knowing full well that the purpose of Parler's existence is (was) to facilitate communication that larger social networks stifle, and categorize as hate speech?
Maybe something is lost over text, but I genuinely prefaced my question because I know it's a delicate political topic for people. But your response is just childish. I literally barely know anything about Parler. Also, how is asking for evidence so triggering? That should be the cornerstone of any these types of discussions.
But to answer your question: No, I can't prove to you what I'm thinking. Nobody ever can. So perhaps you should just take my question on face value and stop assuming malicious intent.
So the answer is no. In that case let me answer for you while you have your moment of outrage.
A hacker named donk_enby made a back up that will soon be available for researchers to answer just this question. We will be able to look at this data set and see if Parler incites more violence both in absolute numbers and in percentage terms. My best guess is that twitter/has has more calls to violence in absolute terms because it is several times larger and has been around for several years. They have a large moderation team but they're not as responsive in all languages. In percentage terms, that can't be answered yet without looking at the data.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2021/01/11/parler-h...
Tu quoque; it seems uncharitable of you to respond to a "question in good faith" by immediately accusing them of bad faith and of lying, and asking them to prove their innocence by proving a negative.
I think the parent raises a very legitimate question of what defines a "hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism." I've never had a Twitter account myself, but some of the publicly-available content I've seen there there certainly fits that description. Conversely, I did briefly have a Parler account, and what I saw in my particular bubble did not fit that description at all - It was crypto enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and comedians. I'm not trying to imply that my anecdote is data or that Parler is some bastion of positivity, but the way your premise is stated only requires a single counterexample: some "hate speech" exists on Twitter, and not everything on Parler is.
You say, "the purpose of Parler's existence is (was) to facilitate communication that larger social networks stifle." To me that sounds like the old adage that "the Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it." At least five years ago that was largely seen as a feature rather than a bug. But recently the tide of popular opinion seems to have shifted in general favor of censorship. Undeniably there are some bad ideas out there, but I worry that the "cure" of censorship is a slippery slope that could very quickly become worse than the disease.
Good question. Normally I would try to figure this out for myself by logging on to Parler and taking a look. But Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg have decided that I can't be trusted to do that -- I could become a Nazi or Qanon nutter and try to violently overthrow the government.
I really dodged a bullet. Thank God for our tech overlords and their new Ministry of Truth. I can now sleep easy knowing that they are busy scouring the rest of the internet and it's marketplace of ideas for more doubleplusbadthink from which to shield me.
The relevant question is about Twitter/FB at a similar development stage. Now, they have all kinds of moderation algorithms and employees, so it's not really a fair comparison.
You have provided an exmaple (I assume, I didn't click the link because I have a productivity blocker which I obviously need to update for Hacker News, lol) of a bad thing on one platform, but not another. But ok, are there vice versa examples?
What I'm getting at is, I understand Parler is generally a right-leaning platform, and therefore the types of "hate" will be right-leaning. Twitter is a generally left-leaning platform, so I would expect their type of hate to be generally left-leaning. So I think a tweet about e.g. storming the Capitol being banned on Twitter but not Parler isn't good evidence that Twitter is better. Because, for example, perhaps a violent Antifa tweet would be left alone on Twitter but censored on Parler. Perhaps some ML bot can quantity sentiment of tweets. That's the kind of evidence I would like to see.
Twitter, Youtube, Facebook all get hundreds of comments of similar nature every hour. They tend to be pretty good about removing them promptly.
If I start a new social media service, what are the objective measures I can use to ensure I'm moderating well and quickly enough? How should we allow this to interact with scale?
If a new startup goes from 10 to 10,000 users overnight, and 0.5% of users post offensive comments that first day, how long does that startup have to remove them all before they are designated as "bad"?
Also, how should we view overmoderation within this context? I think most people would find it injust and orwellian to ban a black sociology professor for posting an academic analysis of the use of the n-word through history, but I fear society is going to overcorrect.
Nobody would bat an eye if you were banned from HN or reddit for hate speech. Why should a platform be any different? If my customer started using my services to spread Nazism, I'd ban them too. Let's say I was a baker - would it be reasonable that I be compelled to draw swastikas on cakes? Obviously, that's absurd! It is equally absurd to demand that other businesses provide platforms for behavior they don't condone.
Freedom of speech is freedom from oppression by government. Parler isn't being oppressed, they just aren't being given a platform to oppress others by private citizens and corporations. Well, not anymore, although lots of corps made some money from them while they could.
I think the issue is that the town square that the first is supposed to protect doesn’t exist anymore. The town square is now Twitter, and valid or not, the de-platforming of a lot of conservatives is going to have a lasting backlash against tech companies.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see GOP resurgence in 2022, along with another very real attack on section 230.
With the town square metaphor: while you cannot be prosecuted for what you say in the square, you can be persecuted by your civilian peers; folks may stop speaking to you, or begin informing others of your nature.
Twitter et al booting persons from their services is the neighbour slamming their door in your face, or the baker refusing to do business with you.
The town square is tcp/ip, not the services on top of it.
Twitter is not the town square since real town squares are owned by the State. They are public spaces for all and, let me point out, that you usually need a permit to speak or have a rally. So they are not that free as everyone thinks.
Twitter is more like a mall owned by a large corporation and while there is some trouble there, they will kick people off the property that are too offensive. If you try to start an insurrection at a mall, you will be kicked out and banned.
It is in Twitters and mall owners best interest to start insurrections on their properties because there will be ramifications for allowing that to happen, that is not good for business.
The pivotal book about freedom of speech, 'On Liberty' from J. S. Mill, is predominantly interested in freedom from societal suppression, not just government suppression:
"Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant - society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it - its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own."
This book had no bearing on the First Amendment's conception of freedom of speech, seeing as how it was written several decades after the formation of the U.S.
This book may have been pivotal to British utilitarianists, but it didn't have much, if any, impact on the U.S.
As an ex-Scientologist it saddens me that I have to tell HN readers this, but please read "On liberty" which explains why censorship is a flawed approach.
Before the U.S., nobody even thought free speech was possible. England was the closest, but their version of free speech was still subject to government censorship.
It was the writings of the Founding Fathers, and the Bill of Rights in particular, that established the doctrine that is today known as "freedom of speech."
French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen expressed freedom of speech at roughly the same time as american Bill of Rights, and used formulation that is more general and does not restrict just the government:
"The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, in the cases determined by the law."
Mill may be the most passionate philosopher to defend this maximalist interpretation of free speech, but he is hopelessly out of date. Mill was a proponent of the 'marketplace of ideas' delusion that has been shown over the past few decades to be an illusion; Mill seems to think that knowledge, and only knowledge, emerges from arguments between dedicated opponents. These quaint bon mots from twee English gentlemen of the Victorian period are about as relevant to modern life as are their opinions about medicine, hygiene, education, and the role of women. Interesting as a historical artifact but not for much more.
You are saying that social censure is no longer something that humans need to worry about. That the concept of is a free exchange of ideas is antiquated, and that the principle of letting people learn from their debates was only valid a hundred years ago? All because of some tech algorithms?
I saw a great analogy on Twitter:
Imagine Twitter as the anti-homosexual cake shop and Q-Anon/Trump/Radical Right as the couple who want a cake for their gay wedding.
Specifically, how does banning people for their actions work well as an analogy for banning someone for who they are (and you must take that for granted, because that's the legal frameworks opinions on the matter)?
That's also an even worse example because the supreme court found in favor of the cake shop.
I think it is the reverse. If a baker can't be forced to bake a rainbow cake (for members of a protected class) then AWS most certainly cannot be forced to provide service to people espousing violent political action (not a protected class.)
This is exactly the point that the article misses. It's not contradictory to hold the views that "This was the right decision" and "This decision shouldn't have been up to private companies".
While there are significant improvements that could be made to our laws, the most significant failure here is one of enforcement. When Republican senators chose not to hear witnesses during the impeachment trial they took a significant step towards making Donald Trump a despot and legitimizing the alt-right. The recent strife is a direct consequence.
Come on. People keep citing "key events" that led to this. It's silly. The rioters would've not rioted if more witnesses had been heard? You think they even are aware of the trial proceedings?
If these witnesses were presented and heard, leading to (long shot maybe, but still) a conviction by the Senate of Trump, of course, things would have been very different today.
You can argue that the violent events of last week would have simply taken place early last year, but at least it might not have threatened peaceful transfer of power after the elections.
On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them?
That has always been the history of media, see Hearst, Murdoch, Mercer, etc. The democracy of the early Internet was the exception from billionaires being in charge, not the norm.
Hearst used to be the voice of print media for decades.
The situation in radio is the same as it is on the internet: a few publicly-owned companies own a supermajority of the FM airwaves. If you wonder why you can change the station and hear the same song simultaneously on 5 different stations, it's because they're all owned by the same company.
In TV, for most of the past 2 decades, conservative billionaires have owned more than 75% of the public TV stations in the U.S. and Australia, and have been using that bully pulpit on behalf of conservatives during that time. Murdoch especially was instrumental in providing Trump (and other extremist candidates like Cruz) thousands of hours of free coverage during the 2016 campaign. The ownership groups would regularly interfere with local media and demand they either air or avoid topics as directed by ownership. Where was conservative outrage over billionaires deciding speech during this time?
I think one difference is that people inhabit and create social media in a way that they didn't with print and TV. A significant percentage of our lives is spent in these de factor public squares.
As a media company that 'creates' tweets to be displayed on CNN, etc., or read by logged out users, the analogy to traditional media is more straightforward.
How was it different from Facebook? Plenty of hate there, for months, why aren't they shutdown?
Just listen to the Parler executives account of what happened. Contrary to all the nonsense being spewed by ideologues, Parler did have a moderation policy that prohibited incitement to violence, and they did enforce it, but it was neither perfect nor instantaneous (since, by deliberate choice, only humans were involved). They also complied to the requests from the three tech titans, but of course that did not matter, their fate was sealed before the first letter was sent.
This is a moment of astonishing hypocrisy and terrible abuse of power. Silicon Valley has proven to half of America that the system is rigged beyond recourse, and for a number of those Americans that might be the straw that breaks the camels back, leading them into radicalization and terrorism. It would be very wise for all of us in tech, in any position of influence, to urge calm and dialogue and to provide space for all speech that is not urging violence. We are not children to throw away our country because of a single deranged fool. We need to show to the country that tech is not an instrument available to only those of a certain ideological bent and that we can talk and sort out our differences without violence or repression.
Parler was created to be a place where the alt-right could freely spout their lies without fear of censorship. Facebook has that, but it's not the reason the platform exists. The intent is completely different.
People digging into Parler found out that all new users were shadowbanned by default until a group of like-minded moderators reviewed and approved their posts.
These moderators were overwhelmingly MAGA/Trump supporters, so I'm sure you can guess what kind of posts they expected to see before they unblocked a new user.
This was all shared/revealed on Twitter, so take it as "evidence" with whatever grain of salt you like, but people didn't just make up these claims about what Parler was..
So while perhaps Parler claimed to be a place for open debate and unrestricted ideas, it is seems that was just a thin cover for their much more focused goal of being a home for all this extremist right-wing talk in America.
Thanks, I took a look. It is not the most coherent presentation but I can see there were examples of crappy posts in there, but so there are everywhere else. The AWS letter made the most reasonable argument and it amounted to an indictment of Parler's technical ability to keep manual moderation working in the face of increasing traffic. Whether that really was the problem or just a virtue display from Amazon is unclear to me.
Vice also published a good summary of the stuff that was scraped from Parler when their SaaS providers went down, but most of it is based on interview with the Twitter user above.
Do you even hear yourself? AWS banning Parlor will cause radicalization and terrorism? You are blaming AWS for the violence, not the sites refusing to moderate and the people doing it?
I guess shutting down mosques that promoted terrorism led to more terrorism?
Analogies are fun, but here's a better one. What do you think would happen if you bombed to rubble a mosque that for the most part is frequented by regular people but occasionally is visited by terrorists? For the sake of fairness let's assume you first gave the mosque 24 hours to put in a place a system that you are confident will prevent any terrorist from coming through the door.
Isn’t the solution pretty simple? Make platforms choose, either only remove illegal material, or be regulated as a publisher. Would take care of calls to violence and freedom of speech.
Would also put a huge burden on small businesses. I run a little forum for by business. I want to remove spam and off-topic posts, so I'll be classed as a publisher, but I don't want to be subject to restrictions of "Publishers may be held liable for omissions, mistakes, and transgressions of their authors". What if a user quotes somebody else's words but doesn't use proper quotation marks? My problem!
Well, marking posts as spam or off-topic isn’t the same thing as blocking someone though, so there should be a middle ground.
And in any case, it seems pretty straightforward to forbid platforms from banning PEOPLE, it should only be possible to ban utterances. At the very least, Trump should have a legal right to be unbanned as long as he doesn’t post things that Twitter doesn’t allow.
I’ve been using Parler since June to discuss fairly mainstream views and talk about day to day life on a Twitter alternative. This week that option was taken away from me, without due process for me or the company in question. The alleged violations were nothing I hadn’t seen on Twitter, except Twitter regularly hosts even worse content, but I guess it has enough important people using it to crush alternatives on shaky claims and spotty evidence.
We should really be talking about Ron Paul because as a test plaintiff Parker is awful. Per their CEO, law firms, banks and payment providers, mail and texting services have also cancelled on them.
By that point, what would having your own tech stack do? How do you even collect revenue when banks and payment providers cancel on you? This is the power of freedom of association at work, the power behind cancellation.
Indeed - Ron Paul is not so much the "canary in the coalmine" - this is the whole mining crew succumbing to the toxic fumes!
Even for people who don't agree with his libertarian politics, there's no arguing that he is anything short of an uncommonly decent man. He's certainly the closest I've ever seen anyone come to being the mythical "honest politician." So of course they're attacking him...
What? He wrote a whole bunch of extremely racist op-eds about how black people are inferior and slavery was a boon to them. Your post is a lot of dissembling nonsense.
That seems unlikely. Do you have links to any reliable primary sources, if they haven't been conveniently censored?
I have a hunch that any "extremely racist" comments may have been more to the effect that although slavery was very bad indeed, there might have been better ways to dismantle it than by half the country fighting the other half [0], which is a sentiment worth considering in the context of current events.
You as the consumer accepted the terms of service of the hosting site. So don't be surprised when things like this happen once you've violated the terms of service.
This will push towards a balkanization of the Internet at the platform level as people will want to self-determine the terms of service for the basis of their communication. Second boom spurred by corporate hubris. You might think there's nothing wrong with this hubris, depending on how comfy your pockets are when lined with their money. The grand majority of the world will not agree – they are not paid by them, when they are they are not treated fairly, and if they are treated fairly they are likely within a sociological bubble.
This will push towards a balkanization of the
Internet at the platform level as people will
want to self-determine the terms of service
for the basis of their communication.
This seems like a good outcome. Rather than arguing about whether or not Facebook and Twitter should allow various kinds of content, folks can choose the sorts of spaces to which they'd rather belong. And it's not like you have to pick one and only one. It just seems like a non-problem.
My feeling is that most people would not like to belong to a space where open racism and other abhorrent views are tolerated and encouraged.
Those that do can have their fringe spaces, but they shouldn't expect mainstream companies to help them do so.
At the level of speech, yes I agree with you. It becomes a problem when these commercial platforms meddle with government business and the social contract. Things everyone is supposed to have and equally. This means access to fundamental goods and services – health, banking, food and water, employment, emancipation, etc. Software only gets to eat the world if it involves itself in every industry and aspect of life, end to end. And no one makes money in startups unless you are a unicorn (unlikely) or acquired by a large existing player (more likely). Where does this go in a post-COVID recovery with 60% unemployment and the destruction of small business?
I never thought I would say this, but I have become a fan of Europe's approach to regulation. They've pushed for GDPR which at least gets us the ability to obtain and delete our data, they've acknowledged the right to repair, and as self-serving as it may be, they understand the ramifications of a unilateral takedown of the communications of a head of state – particularly the precedent it sets. They will likely continue their fight until they've setup their own alternatives to SV-based infrastructure.
Parler may sue to have their site reinstated, which they are, I don't see an issue here. If these companies were wrong to take them down the courts will force these companies to reverse it. I don't think they will though because multiple posts, comments etc on Parler apparently match the criteria for incitement which Parler insufficiently moderated and is not covered by 1st Amendment rights.
> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?
I find it ironic that the ban is what makes people think the techCos are controlling society rather than the fact that all actions of social networks and hosting services impact society. Like the time when FB make some news feeds more negative to track impact and engagement. Or how the radicalization of users on FB can happen due to the Algo.
Ultimately this is a legislative failure, but it also is how a free market should defend itself of dangerous content as well. (keep in mind a Civil war 2 isn't exactly great for the economy).
What is wild is that the laws for this all exist and are in use. The behavior here is the use of Section 230 as designed. The definition of insurrection and hate speech are all defined. Clearly what has happened is actually late action by social platforms rather than overreach as the US Gov lacks any mode to actually take on this content.
I'm in the same boat as you - I'm glad parler is gone but I go back and forth on the implications of the ability of a few to silence so many - the most reasonable way I've come to think of it is if David Duke (huge racist scumbag) suddenly wanted to go on CNN and speak for an hour once a week - should CNN let him? You wouldn't think twice about it, you'd likely think - why would CNN have to comply? It's not a perfect analogy, but that's the best way I've been able to think of it.
In the end, it's lose-lose for non fascists. While we're all debating whether there was overreach and or if it should be mitigated, actual fascists are regrouping and planning their next assault.
Are they actually being silenced, as in someone is forcing them to not express their thoughts? Can they not congregate together the old fashioned way and have as much free speech as they want?
> in an ideal world, we have laws applied even handedly to deal with this
We have laws protecting people from discrimination based on race, sexuality, etc. A grocery store can't refuse to serve people by race. Maybe we should expand these protected classes and make sure they apply to Internet businesses as well. I don't think we will (or should) expand them in such a way that Parler would be included, though.
> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech
Yes? I mean, look where you're posting. HN is very heavily moderated. Check out dang's post history for all the work he has to do. HN has very clear ideas on what speech is "acceptable" and what is not, and they are significantly more complicated than the "don't incite political violence" standard being enforced against Parler.
I mean, really. Parler failed to clear even the simplest, most straightforward, most consensus- and norm-driven ideals of how public discourse is supposed to work. And they didn't really get "moderated" any harder than any of us would have.
Yet we still have to rally behind them as the standard-bearer for megacorp censorship? Really? Can't we wait for at least a tiny bit of evidence that they're misusing their power first?
Comments that are acceptable on Parler: "Personally I'm hoping for war I'd love to crush leftist skulls and rip out their spines. Rally your soy boys. Your Pantifa and BLM wannabe gangsters. I'll bath myself is leftist blood and drink from your skullcaps."
Comments that are unacceptable on Parler: Pretending to be a cow owned by Devin Nunes
What makes you think the former is acceptable on Parler? Are there documented cases where something like that was reported and Parler refused to take it down?
When it comes to issues like these I tend to agree with the sentiment of "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
But this isn't about criminalising speech promoting conspiracy theories, radicalisation, and racism. It's about private entities withdrawing the infrastructure of speech, which obviously gets a lot more complicated to reason about and legislate.
I'm mostly okay with Apple and Google removing the app from their stores. I'm slightly less okay with Amazon withdrawing their services. But if Parler ends up reborn on a server running out of someones house or business I would be very much against their utility providers cutting off access.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm with you and don't quite know what to think about this either.
However I do worry that if we're not careful as a society someone posting on HN (or maybe a government approved Facebook group) will eventually say:
>The internet was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. So it's no loss that it's gone, and it took far too long to deal with it.
Let's put it a different way then. Imagine right wing dystopia where everything you value is considered bad. Now you try to discuss Gay rights. You can't talk about it on Facebook, nor on any platform, as they ban you instantly. You build your own platform. Aws/gcp/azure ban you there too and kill the whole thing. I'm going to go the next step. Now credit cards and other payment services refuse services as well.
Are you supposed to rebuild the entire tech ecosystem that the entire world runs on? Fight through every damn moat along the way? Is this the bar we set here?
Its easy to talk free speech for popular speech. It's how people react to unpopular speech that shows their true colours.
There are other laws than the 1st Amendment that come into play here.
The 3 biggest technology companies in the world united in the last two days to shut down an upstart competitor who was, at the time, literally the #1 app on iPhone and Android.
So the issue is primarily one of anti-trust laws. Monopolies do not get to arbitrarily and selectively enforce their ToS against competitors; that is an illegal abuse of market power.
The tech giants this week seem to have demonstrated that they do in fact hold monopoly power in the market, and are willing to use it to crush a potential competitor. This seems to me to be an unprecedented situation, a likely anti-trust violation, and potentially to the extent that it was a coordinated action by these companies, a violation of RICO statutes.
I think it is fair to say that Parler, like every social network, could be used to post hateful messages, or messages advocating violence. GP stated that Parler was a “hate site” but I think it’s more accurate to say that Parler was a site that carried some hateful messages. It was by no means a site formed or designed specifically to carry hate.
A corollary that I would raise is a similar standard in copyright infringement. Sites which are designed specifically with the intent of committing copyright infringement are now criminally liable — it has recently become a serious felony to make these kinds of sites. However, site that show a significant non-infringement purpose are not illegal, even if some infringement takes place on their platform. You might recall that YouTube was a site that got its start with rampant copyright infringement, and to this day has a significant amount of infringing material on its servers, but it is not criminally liable, or even civilly liable for that content due to the fact that the site has a significant non-infringement purpose. I think that’s a fair analogy with Parler.
If there’s a copyright or public safety issue with a piece of content posted on a social media platform, the law should provide for a takedown procedure against the content, not against the whole platform. The cause of action should be against the poster, not against the entire platform. Nuking the entire platform from orbit is not an appropriate remedy, and in any case should be done through a court of law, not through the actions of a monopolistic cartel.
> The 3 biggest technology companies in the world united in the last two days to shut down an upstart competitor who was, at the time, literally the #1 app on iPhone and Android.
Maybe Facebook, but...
How did Parler compete with Apple? What market were they competing in?
How did Parler compete with AWS? Did they share the same sort of clients?
If there’s a copyright or public safety issue with a piece of content posted on a social media platform, the law should provide for a takedown procedure against the content, not against the whole platform. The cause of action should be against the poster, not against the entire platform.
Remember Parler was asked by the tech co's to moderate such content, and it refused.
> If there’s a copyright or public safety issue with a piece of content posted on a social media platform, the law should provide for a takedown procedure against the content, not against the whole platform.
For many kinds of criminal content posing an acute public safety hazard, it does, and it's very simple: if you have knowledge of the existence of the material, you must take it down or become yourself criminally liable for it, in addition to anyone who is already criminally liable. (For copyright, there's the DMCA takedown process, which is more generous because people don't tend to get killed as a forseeable consequence of civil copyright violations.)
Of course, if you are a second level host and don't have item-by-item control (such as AWS for a site hosted there by another firm), the only efficient way to acheived that may be to drop the entire account.
> For many kinds of criminal content posing an acute public safety hazard, it does, and it's very simple: if you have knowledge of the existence of the material, you must take it down or become yourself criminally liable for it.
I'd be quite surprised if this is true in the USA. If you could provide an example of such a case I'd be very interested. The only time I'm aware of the Supreme Court ruling on online hate speech was to overturn the conviction of a Anthony Elois, who posted some truly disgusting things online. [1]
I'm not aware of any case where an internet platform was held crminally liable for content posted on their platform, in fact Section 230 provides "wide immunity" for both criminal and civil liability for the content that users post. [2]
For example, from [2];
> A recent case [3] out of the 2nd Circuit illustrates the types of issues courts are facing in our era of social media predominance and terrorist attacks.
> The 2nd Circuit case arose after Hamas posted content on Facebook that both directly and indirectly led to the attack and death of several Israeli nationals, including a 10 year-old girl. The victims subsequently sued Facebook for allowing the posts to exist, and to “match” terrorist sympathizers with terrorist organizations.
> While the content at issue violated Facebook’s terms of service and Community Standards, Facebook did not remove the content prior to the attacks.
> > For many kinds of criminal content posing an acute public safety hazard, it does, and it's very simple: if you have knowledge of the existence of the material, you must take it down or become yourself criminally liable for it.
> I'd be quite surprised if this is true in the USA. If you could provide an example of such a case I'd be very interested. The only time I'm aware of the Supreme Court ruling on online hate speech
This isn't about hate speech, which is protected speech. It's about a subset of content which is itself criminal (that is, for which the source would be criminally liable), where a service provider knows of the content and the facts which make it criminal (whether or not they understand the criminal prohibition itself)
And it's not about civil liability (things some private party can sue you for damages, and where therefore the Section 230 protection is likely to apply) but criminal liability, that is, things where the government can take action leading to criminal fines and/or imprisonment.
Examples of laws creating this kind of knowledge-based obligation are 18 USC Sec 2339A regarding material sorry to terrorists and 18 USC Sec 1466A with regard to obscene visual representation of the sexual abuse of children.
I posted this in response to another of your comments, but in Section 2339a;
> ...it is necessary that a defendant in some sort associate himself with the venture, that he participate in it as in something that he wishes to bring about, [and] that he seek by his action to make it succeed.”
The example of Sec 1466a is an excellent one. Facebook is the world’s largest platform for sharing exactly those types images, and they have not been charged under 1466a, because they are not liable under it.
What would be pertinent is 18 USC 2258A [2] which requires service providers to report any such content that that are made aware of to the tip line, but by now we are far afield of the topic at hand.
A simple introduction on hosting and platform liability, for example [1].
> The tech giants this week seem to have demonstrated that they do in fact hold monopoly power in the market, and are willing to use it to crush a potential competitor. This seems to me to be an unprecedented situation, a likely anti-trust violation, and potentially to the extent that it was a coordinated action by these companies,
Coordinated? Competitor? Where do you find evidence of coordination? Why do you think parler is a competitor?
> it’s more accurate to say that Parler was a site that carried some hateful messages
Not accurate at all. Why do you think people used parler instead of twitter.
> Nuking the entire platform from orbit is not an appropriate remedy
When the entire platform resists and refuses to moderate, nuking from orbit is a fine remedy. Parler was too stupid to build alternatives into their risk profile. I think they believed their own hype.
I'm mostly in agreement with you, and if the choice were left to me I probably wouldn't have banned Parler from the app stores or AWS. Although I'd have to reconsider if an incoming Biden administration would punish me in any upcoming anti-trust case, as cowardly as that may seem.
But I also think the rights of the services providers have to considered as well. Should Nintendo be forced to publish porn apps in their Switch online store for example? Should HN be prevented from moderating comments here? Should thedonald.win be prevented from deleting anti-Trump comments? No is my answer to those rhetorical questions.
At the same time I don't think that electricity, water, and internet service providers should be allowed to cut off Westboro Baptist Church either. Likewise for their domain name provider.
I think things like AWS and payment services are more like electric and water suppliers then they are like app stores and web forums. So I suppose that I'm in favour of drawing a line in a reasonable place, it's just not clear to me yet exactly where that line should be.
What would help is what we should have done a long time ago: Apple should either allow users to install different app stores or submit to regulation as a platform.
> When it comes to issues like these I tend to agree with the sentiment of "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
That approach, combined with filter bubbles and AI recommendations driving engagement/addiction, gave us rise of things like Antivax movement, Trump, QAnon and now an attempted coup in the US.
We should probably think hard before we consider it the only possible approach.
At the same time, saying "some speech actually isn't ok" doesn't mean that unaccountable monopolies of corporate overlords that wield more power than some nation states are ok. Both things can be true at the same time.
The root cause of the things you describe aren’t free speech or filter bubbles.
It’s a lack of confidence and trust in our governments and corporations. The fact that those same governments and corporations own our media makes it even worse.
I think criminalising unpopular speech will make the symptoms of this problem worse rather than better.
"Criminalizing unpopular speech" is a peculiar way to answer to "some speech might be harmful".
Is sharing someone else's private information, publishing outright lies about safety of vaccines, or claiming some ethnicities or nationalities are subhuman and should be murdered right now "unpopular speech"?
I mean, I sure as hell hope it is unpopular!
But it is much more than just "unpopular speech". Framing it like "criminalizing unpopular speech" makes it sound like someone wants to criminalize saying "I think the Twilight series were genuinely good movies." but we're talking about people saying "All those <insert slur> should be killed."
And yet, you are right that in some cases this happens - for example when some US states decided to solve problem of people complaining about animal cruelty by making filming on farms illegal. That's a complete bullshit and it is harmful to the society.
But people who incite violence and Antivaxxers who actively hurt people by spreading diseases? I don't think so.
I’ll try to address all of your points. I’ll start by saying that inciting people to violence is already illegal so I don’t think this particular point needs addressing further.
I use the term unpopular speech as a binary divider of speech between popular speech and unpopular speech. Popular speech doesn’t require protection by definition so the implication is that free speech laws exist to protect unpopular speech. I wasn’t suggesting that “I like Twilight” is equivalent to “<slurs> should be killed.”
Yes I would describe lies about vaccines, claiming that some groups of humans are subhuman, and doxing as both harmful and as examples of unpopular speech. Also they are unpopular because they are harmful rather than because they are untrue (doxing people is harmful directly because the information is correct).
All those things, despite being harmful, are legal. It seems that you are suggesting that we should consider banning some forms of unpopular speech because it is harmful. By banning it I assume you mean to make it illegal. If you mean something else please let me know!
Depending on where you are. I come from a place where saying "All <slur> deserve to be killed!" already is illegal and would already possibly land you in prison.
Not vaccines though, but that might come to pass as well, since vaccine safety misinformation is basically manipulation that runs vulnerable people into biological weapons and that's pretty bad.
And life is ... fine. We go on without having the (pretty much uniquely USian) 100 % unlimited free speech.
Comparing different places is always difficult - Germany is understandably much harsher at limiting Nazis than US is - but saying there's less school shooters and domestic terrorists because of it probably doesn't see the whole truth like mental healthcare, quality of education and access to weapons etc.
I'll simplify the issue for you. Your tribe won out in this particular battle but you're worried that may not always be the case. You should absolutely be worried about that.
I don't think it's inconsistent to simultaneously believe:
* In general, tech companies should be less powerful and monopolistic.
* In this specific case, the tech companies used the power they have in a way that is overall beneficial to society.
Trump incited a violent insurrection on the US Capitol. If Senators and Representatives had not successfully escaped through tunnels before the rioters got to them, some of them would be dead. The fact that Trump is still in office after that shows that the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch to check Trump's executive power.
In the absence of that, we need some entity powerful enough to push back against rising fascism and authoritarianism. I don't like that that power apparently has to be a handful of tech giant companies, but I'll take that (temporarily at least) over the US becoming a right-wing dictatorship.
> the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch
I'm more concerned by this than anything else. In effect this results in calcified government, which can neither regulate tech companies (or anything) effectively, or serve as a check on executive power. People need to start moving to Wyoming and Alaska, yeah the weather sucks.....but we need to redefine 'civic duty'.
It's like a newspaper, with editors deciding which letters to the editor to publish or not. Tech companies are really media companies, it's just that we don't consume dead trees anymore.
Parler was not a "hate site." It's a social media platform that chose to take a reactive rather than proactive approach to policing illegal behavior, and experienced the growing pains of an up-and-comer advertising itself as a Twitter alternative that then had to deal with a flood of Twitter refugees during a political crisis.
The overwhelming vast majority of the people on Parler were simply normal people tired of what they perceived as a double standard in Twitter's treatment of conservatives as opposed to liberals, and wished to support a competitor.
Would Voltaire's famous "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" apply here?
Perhaps we need a better, faster judicial mechanism for taking down "major content". I'm not saying the government is a great solution for this problem, but IMHO it beats the status quo until we can find a better system.
Interesting examples - both Newspapers and TV Stations, for their public "platform" nature, don't enjoy certain libel protections that Social Media does.
FB's "platform" feature is largely listener-driven. You can still use FB and not listen to persons X, Y and Z. It's all posted by users, and users decide what to follow or read (except paid content). Not like TV Stations and Newspapers. That's what Social Media companies have been telling us for a while!
But if we want apply usual standards of platform rights and responsibilities to FB, we should then require it to also be responsible for what's posted there.
As much as some of the Parler content was definitely awful, I've seen much worse on dialup BBS's and during the Great Cognitive Corruption of Usenet that started in the 80's and greatly accelerated onwards from there.
I'm more troubled by the total cessation of infrastructure as the mitigation of choice, rather than a temporary pause of services. During the pause, work with law enforcement to identify those specific posts that satisfy the Brandenberg "imminent" criteria, mark those as redacted, then return to service. Leaving open possible further work with law enforcement to share a feed and tie in redaction by future judicial decisions. I'm hoping I missed where it says that Parler was offered this choice and turned it down.
I'm even more troubled by the continued "let them eat cake" dismissive ennui of the chattering classes to the natural-world plights of the most radicalized members of the Trump supporters (and for that matter, to BLM supporters' plights treatment by other chattering classes), as they're pretty much at the "nothing left to lose" stage. Having been not simply ignored since the 70's onwards, but jeered at, derided, and mocked, instead of rehabilitating their life situations, has driven them into the arms of malign ideologies that openly lie to them fealty will improve their lot in life, when no other ideology will have them.
Just like in my enterprise work with my clients, when I hear extreme dissatisfaction, that's an opportunity for me to listen, empathize, then work together iteratively to solve problems. Instead, the US treats such expressions as opportunities to suppress. That only guarantees the pressure builds up elsewhere you cannot predict (in enterprise work, it often manifests as political chits being called in, and budget found where none was found before to completely pivot away and build the users' own solution, however imperfect it may be).
The US treats many of its have-nots (all along the political spectrum and not just along one vector) like it treats its prisoners. Brutalize with platitude-laden inaction instead of rehabilitate. It's no wonder the nation manufactures a dictatorship-loving consent.
I keep seeing this sentiment pop up here on HN and I've come at it in other posts.
All of the Trump supporters I know are upper middle class suburbanites who have been fairly well off for quite a while. Not sure I have any empathy for the contempt at all. I just don't buy this sob story what-so-ever.
I feel even less bad for violent extremists that have zero goals or demands except to destabilize everything because they believe whatever they see on the internet. There is no ideology for them to defend; only their right to hate. They only want the ability to have whatever they believe to be true to be the case even when it is not the case.
Ironically, if the people who were truly destitute and down-trodden could find some way to ignore the superficial partisanship that they've been sold and unite under social and economic policy we might have an actual movement on our hands. Unfortunately they've all been convinced that their superficial differences aren't superficial at all and that the other side is wrong; now it appears at any cost.
That's likely an artifact of the circles you run in. If you're on HN, then odds are really good you don't mill around in the lower socio-economic milieu many of the "foot soldiers" of radical movements draw upon, whichever part of the political spectrum we're discussing. Our very vocabulary distinguishes us as a separate "other"; when I speak with them, I have to consciously "tune into" their preferred vocabularies.
The financial bifurcation in the US and to a lesser extent in many other parts of the developed world is quite big, and I don't know how big it has to get before a competent demagogue gets traction in the US. The extremes in both the GOP and the DNC have just been handed a dangerous working template with Trump's history lesson. They just learned that extremism works, and it scales from local to national politics. It was not always so; one of the salient features of American politics in the past was just how consistently difficult it was to move the center any appreciable distance politically, the infamous "lumpentariat".
I believe this is because the US valuation landscape is fundamentally broken. This goes way beyond the economic or financial system. How we account for value over time is structured in very perverse incentive structures leading to the power law popping up in an all-over fashion when in the past it didn't use to dominate the landscape so much (it had localized instantiations but these were more local maxima than a general law more widely applicable). It's generating a "desperation deciles" that the means and averages of metrics sweep under statistical rugs.
I think these deciles are mattering now due to the law of large numbers. With "only" a 100M population base, such deciles are manageable, whether through coercion (unfavorable), assistance (nominal approach), or generationally long-term rehabilitative policy like public education (ideal). But I suspect there is something about near-billion- and billion-scale population governance our governing systems are not scaling to meet.
Also, a consistent theme I see in these kinds of discussions is similar to your "...if the people who were truly destitute and down-trodden could find some way to ignore the superficial partisanship that they've been sold and unite under social and economic policy...". In my humble and limited experience, the ones in the developed world are short-term focused on survival, putting food on the table and a roof over their heads, then with what limited discretionary time and cognitive energy left over, trying to find some happiness in a pretty bleak outlook as globalism systemically blocks their avenues of escape.
There are some limited avenues left, but the arithmetic doesn't support lifting enough of the desperation deciles out of poverty or functional poverty to matter through transitioning them to plumbers, welders, fitters, rig work, etc. While there are currently screaming needs for many of those skills, it isn't in the tens of millions scale we're needing (law of large numbers).
Poor people don't riot if their poverty is perceptibly, contiguously improving over time. Rich people don't incite malign ideologies if there aren't poor people who will act as foot soldiers absorbing the brunt of adverse consequences of swearing fealty to such beliefs. When there is a chicken in every pot, people will riot over sports teams, but not politics. Actual getting-policies-and-legislation-established-and-practiced politics is dead-ass boring to the vast majority, so getting this many people to even pay attention to just the cartoonish depictions of politics we see in the US now is a major signal. I currently don't think it is a good signal. And I suspect it is a more complex signal than "get the wrongthink upper middle class suburbanites to shut up". But I'm just a layperson throwing some brush strokes out there and wanting to hear thoughts...
> Overall it feels like a legislative failure - in an ideal world, we have laws applied even handedly to deal with this.
Whether it will be applied even-handedly remains to be seen, but there is a law to deal with this, and I suspect it's a factor in why businesses of all kinds are running screaming from anything connected to the attacks (including other businesses that fail to themselves cut off any activity with a nexus to the attack, the attackers, and the apparent planning for future attacks): 18 USC Sec 2339A, which makes it a federal crime to knowingly provide any goods or services except medicine and religious materials connected to any of an enumerated list of federal criminal offenses collectively designated “terrorism”, punishable by fines and imprisonment for up to 15 years unless death occurs as a result of the crime, in which case the imprisonment becomes for any term of years or life.
There are laws, but as a practical matter they aren't enforced.
Individuals are not held responsible for the threats and illegal speech they make. Look at all the threats made against people on social media. The fact that there is almost no accountability means it keeps happening.
The only repercussions most of the time is that the platform kicks you off. Part of it is, its their platform and from a business perspective having you around if you are too toxic isn't wise.
It seems like a society problem. Non enforcement and a lot of people with nothing to loose.
I’d go a step higher, the normative framework that informs our legislation is old and needs to be examined.
We support a market place of ideas because, it was argued that bad ideas would eventually be trumped by better ideas - only by examining bad ideas would we be able to move past them.
Part of that remains true today, but it does not account for the realities of mass communication.
The model ends up painting a passive, solitary image of ideas.
But ideas are neither passive, nor without context. Signal without context is noise.
Nor are brains neutral processors of information, they are vulnerable to psyops, malformed arguments, pressure, ignorance and emotion.
I have read propaganda, I have seen arguments which sound legitimate, but underlying it is xenophobia and hatred.
I know for a fact, that Popper was right and you cannot tolerate the intolerant.
They do not come to discuss or exchange ideas. They come to use your platform as an opportunity to gain followers.
And they use the gaps in our norms to create space for themselves.
Counter speech is not a panacea, it require conditions to work. If those conditions are not satisfied, the strategy fails.
The norms behind modern speech need to account for these trade offs.
The status quo comes with the trade off that partisanship will increase, more people will be radicalized.
This is the trade off, and people have to decide if they are willing to enjoy this trade off.
We can empower democratic institutions like the FTC to be able to take action in these cases, rather than leaving important decisions in the hands of private corporations.
> ...what Parler is doing should be illegal, because it should be responsible on product liability terms for the known outcomes of its product, aka violence. ... But what Parler is doing is not illegal, because Section 230 means it has no obligation for what its product does.... Similarly, what these platforms did in removing Parler should be illegal, because they should have a public obligation to carry all customers engaging in legal activity on equal terms. But it’s not illegal, because there is no such obligation. These are private entities operating public rights of way, but they are not regulated as such.
Parler.com is down too. It's been removed from DNS. DNS server is EPIK.COM ("Resilient domains"). Their DNS server is returning 0.0.0.0, instead of NXDOMAIN. The domain is still on Verisign, and they don't seem to be doing anything to it.
> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?
Parler was co-founded by an unelected billionaire as a "grassroots" way for the Mercers to push their ideology and their version of "acceptable speech". I don't really have any qualms with their power play getting shut down, and I don't think other businesses should be forced to support it.
Would this law also apply to LeBron James when he “incites” black youth by claiming black people “are hunted everyday” by the police? A fact check would show the statistics don’t support such a claim. It’s clearly dangerous speech that needs to be moderated. Why does the left assume nobody has any agency over their own actions?
My concern is not that AWS should be forced to host content they don't want. It's that AWS (and Apple, Facebook, and others) have misrepresented what they do.
It's no shock that DailyKos shouldn't have to host pro-Trump content. Nor should /theDonald have to host pro-Bernie content. We all agree that people can choose who to associate with, and that free association is important.
But AWS (and Facebook and others) didn't say "we're sites that present only one kind of content" the way /theDonald and DailyKos did. They presented themselves as universal tools for people to express themselves, build their own sites, install apps, etc.
So it comes as a shock when AWS says "we actually only want to support sites that present views that Jeff Bezos thinks are reasonable." And when Apple says "you can only download apps on your phone that we think do a good enough job moderating." And when Facebook bans people for posting wrong opinions.
The government can't and probably shouldn't force AWS to host content that Bezos doesn't agree with. It would be Amazon's right to host only content that is pro-Trump, or equally Amazon's right to only host content that is anti-Trump. But when Amazon presents something as a neutral utility but secretly enforces different rules, we can and should criticize them.
That's true even if all the content being removed today is garbage. I haven't seen any "worthwhile" content that's been affected by the recent moves, and I have never heard of any valuable speech on Parler. But I am still concerned that Apple gets to decide what apps I can install on my phone because they don't like the content. For every Apple (managed in California by socially liberal periople) there's a Walmart (managed in Arkansas by social conservatives) that will take the same powers and use them in a different way. Walmart is legally free to remove pro-BLM books from their online bookshelves, but we can and should criticize them if they do.
I feel like erotic, kink and LGBTQ+ communities got hit with all the new rules. Over the last few years they've been kicked out of Tumblr, now Instagram, Twitch and Youtube aren't really happy with non PG13 content, Apple refusing to publish Fetlife app for years or Onlyfans, Pornhub deleting all content from non-partners and so on...
Honestly feels like just companies are trying to maximize their profits and "don't be evil" became just an old memory.
You can still say what you want. It’s just harder to say DIVISIVE HATEFUL RACIST INCITING VIOLENCE against blank. (Caps because I don’t have italics on phone, not yelling). I control what’s on my private network. Issue is people “want” to use these networks to spread their “#%$&£x” to the largest audience. These bad faith arguments, because you can’t come to “my house” and cause your trouble. No you don’t have that right. Do it at “your house”. Can someone explain how Twitter/Amazon/Apple/Google owe me?
They aren't deciding what free speech is acceptable, they're deciding what free speech is acceptable on their private platforms.
People are pretending like the platforms that deplatformed the group inciting violence are the only platforms on the internet that they could have used, they're not - they're not monopolies in regards to that. They are however the most convenient platforms to use because of various reasons, however we're not talking about having a right to convenience - we're talking about having the right to free speech, which everyone still does in America and on the internet.
Some advice: if you're going to have a mob boss and wannabe tyrant like Trump and rally your followers on a platform, I'd recommend using, depending on, technology layers of owners who are aligned with you and okay with inciting of violence; Trump goes on Fox News to say whatever the fuck he wants to millions of people while saying he's being prevented from free speech - come on now people, let's come back to reality and stop getting sucked into the gaslighting.
Your definition of monopoly is wrong. Microsoft was judged by the court to be abusing its monopoly power by bundling IE with Windows and making it difficult to uninstall even though users could still install competing browsers if they spent the extra effort.
There's no natural monopoly that you can't find an alternative to if you're willing to spend enough effort.
IF we proceed from the hypothesis that X is "a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism"
AND we want to ban the whole platform X,
THEN it would be logical to ban also all the layers down the technological stack: AWS, Google Play Store, Telecoms that transported the traffic etc.
Indeed, X platform has approximately the same responsibility as other platform layers and hence they all should be punished.
Another idea is to punish them proportionally to their ability to check the content published on the platform so that telecoms probably will not be punished at all because they are not able to read encrypted traffic.
"just like I wouldn't bat an eye for AWS taking down an ISIS recruitment site, I don't really see any loss here."
There were about 10 million people on Parler before it was taken down. If you really think its comporable to an ISIS recruitment site, we got a much, much bigger problem here.
I suspect the bottom line is that general anonymity on the internet needs to be discarded.
No, wait, hear me out.
No moderation isn't acceptable. Really. (If someone wants to make a counter-assertion, I merely point to this site.)
Non-transparent, corporate moderation doesn't seem palatable to anyone. There are just too many pitfalls.
Independent moderation falls apart when you consider that different fora have different moderation requirements. (A forum for Cinderblock the obese cat is going to be very different from any kind of political or technical site.)
The best case seems to me to be case-by-case, transparent moderation with precedents, similar to common law. And ultimately, I expect transparent moderation to, in the extreme, go to the court system, so that's not necessarily a bad starting point.
Unfortunately, that falls apart when large numbers of participants are (including, say, moderators) are not speaking in good faith. I see two possible ideas to address that: First, to tie accounts to physical identities (but not necessarily disallowing the account to be effectively anonymous), to cut the number of bots, multiple accounts, etc. Second, to attach an account to a user's reputation (which does break anonymity). The results I see are to cut down on the volume of crap while ensuring users have skin in the game (with a side order of making legal action against stalking, harassment, and threats).
But what about those situations that require anonymity? Most of those already have legal and social protections: psychological, religious, and legal counseling, for example. I would support anonymity for those fora, which places responsibility for moderation on the fora, of course, as well as meaning that the moderation cannot be transparent.
One area does require special handling: whistleblowing. It does require anonymity, and does not have any current legal or social protections. That needs to be fixed.
But anyway, as a general rule, the default for social media should not support anonymity. The only way to free providers like Facebook, Reddit, this site, or AWS from responsibility for what is posted there is to place that responsibility on the actual posters---having no responsibility doesn't work, and giving that power to the discretion of the owner of the provider isn't acceptable.
There are some objections that I think I can answer, but this comment is getting too long for me, so I'll wait until anyone cares.
And no, the irony of Parler's requirement of photo-ids and (allegedly) SSNs isn't lost on me.
> but not necessarily disallowing the account to be effectively anonymous
With the average opsec of chat sites, would you bet on "effectively"? Ironically Parler itself just had a leak.
Even if a company currently has good opsec, it can be acquired and go downhill (or turn evil).
In the current climate, this comment could (and would) be construed as implicit support of Parler, with all the consequences. The rich left loves "consequences", except for themselves.
Yep, a random company would not be a good identity provider. (I've been up to my elbows in SAML2 before, so that's going to color my response.)
But suppose you set up a specific semi-public organization to act as the identity provider. (Like IANA? Maybe that's not a good example. :-)) Following something like a provably secure communications flow[1], the chat site gets a unique number representing the user. That's all they know about the user.
Alternatively, and with the approval of the user, the site gets the user's name or whatever the user wishes their online reputation to be associated with and can display that, for their comments to be taken seriously.
Ok, so let's take the example of Parler. Parler doesn't moderate its content, and actively resists attempts outside attempts to do so. However, anything illegal is still associated with individuals and the court system can force Parler to complete the link (that's the "effectively anonymous" approach, here), resulting in that user facing legal consequences. (This is opposed to the current system, where Parler could be technically designed to be unable to complete that link (Yeah, Parler are idiots.) and any kind of moderation relies on Parler's goodwill.)
AWS can continue to host Parler under the cover of a statement like "The POPO are keeping them in check." Or, AWS can kick them off based on measurable facts like "they got more than 10 or 15 subpoenas a day for three months".
As for your last paragraph...
Personally, I think Parler was a sewer filled with the morally and intellectually challenged who lack any sense of responsibility as citizens of the United States of America. (My understanding is that its users were limited to the US, btw.) I understand and agree with its vendor's decisions not to do business with them any more, in the same way I understand and agree with their decisions not to do business with ISIS recruitment sites.
The rich left loves "consequences", except for themselves. The rich right loves "consequences", except for themselves.
The poor love "consequences", except for themselves. Libertarians love "consequences", except for themselves. You love "consequences", except for yourself. I love "consequences", except for myself.[2] Everyone loves "consequences", except for themselves. Because humans suck.
[1] Yeah, I'm a formal logic guy.
[2] Except I don't really, schadenfreude aside. I seem find in myself a streak of moralism and an excessive sensitivity to fairness. It sucks. Even my schadenfreude doesn't extend to the Darwin awards.
> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?
Putting aside questions around whether or not a media filter has always existed in some form...
You're using social media hosted on EC2 instances that can be terminated vs instead of your local newspaper and other similar, less directly filtered options. That's the trade off. I don't really see anything unusual about it - a newspaper could fire a writer (or even hire writers that reflect a certain tone), and nobody batted an eye.
It is the same thing when they take down any other hate site: bye bye haters. Intolerance cannot be allowed to be free speech. Just like you can't walk into a club and yell fire without consequences. We have tragic historical events that set precedence.
> Intolerance cannot be allowed to be free speech.
That's just "I'm for free speech unless I disagree with the speech", right?
Who decides what's too intolerant?
We all love our Popper quotes but it's a very hard line to draw. Nearly any opinion can be explained at being somehow intolerant if you try hard enough.
Pretty much either you agree that Nazis are bad and those that are like them, regardless of the time period are also bad, or you're an idiot. Hate, violence, threats based there upon, are pretty cut and dry.
The whole do on to others as you would have them do on to you is not a new concept. And act like a terrorist and do terrorist acts, makes you a terrorist. And we don't support them. In the end if you want to hate people because it makes you feel better, sure go ahead, just keep your mouth shut and don't act.
I believe the market will work it out. They overuse this power there will be consequences/outcry. We can figure it out when we get there. I'm not worried about any slippery slope.
I don't know why it's right to ban conspiracies. Conspiracies are to be debunked, not banned. Otherwise, people who believe such conspiracies simply go underground and we end up cultivating anger, distrust, and cynicism. Is that covid-19 would turn into a global pandemic back in Feb a conspiracy? Is criticizing USSR in the 30s a conspiracy? Is that earth is not the center of our universe a conspiracy 700 years ago? Is that FBI's infiltration and surveillance on political groups a conspiracy? Are all the questioning on the reasons for the US to invade Iraq conspiracy theories? Where are the WMDs now?
In general, are we sure that no conspiracy ever turned out to be true? How many heresies turned out to be correct and changed the course of our history? And how many people were persecuted in the name of spreading conspiracy? Why are we so afraid of conspiracies?
Right. It's frustrating that the term conspiracy theory has become a blunt weapon that can be used to quickly dismiss allegations of wrong doing and paint the accuser as a fringe lunatic. Sometimes people do evil things or conspire with others to do evil things (see Tuskegee experiments, Epstein, etc.). Just because someone doesn't currently have irrefutable proof that something happened doesn't mean that they shouldn't be able to talk about it.
Most of the modern, big conspiracies have been thoroughly debunked, but that doesn't stop their spread. Any flat-earther has heard all of the flat-earth debunking. Sadly, I know a handful of flat-earthers, and I tried arguing for a while, but it does no good. Instead it appears that the theorists double-down on the conspiracy.
I think people believe in conspiracies, not because they're mislead on a certain topic, but because they want to believe. So debunking conspiracies is attacking their faith, which is what causes zealotry.
It's more like spreading a religion, which, yeah, you can't really ban it. You just have to let people do their thing.
tl;dr I agree that one shouldn't censor it, but only because it does no good.
Have you seen Twitter, Reddit? It's filled with hate, conspiracy, radicalization and racism.
It's astounding how quickly people fall back to their dfault political leanings and stop being objective.
If they can do this to Parler citing politically motivated excuse to shut them down, what stops your company from getting booted off the internet because some of your users posted "lets blow stuff up"?
This sets a dangerous precedent going forward and it affects all of us regardless of your political spectrum. I get that AWS is an independent commercial entity that has its own terms but do you realize the problem of trusting billionaires and their monopoly to always do the right thing?
Tomorrow, the currents might change, and it could be you too.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist....
That's where I think people are missing the point to some extent. I'm taking on good faith what was reported by these companies - but their statements claimed they observed actual concrete planning to organise actual violence and further insurrection. Stopping speech is one thing. But the claim is it is not the speech they are worried about, it is the violence. The infrastructure is being used for more than speech. Removing the infrastructure is being done to impede those larger effects.
Does it change the flavor if I rewrite the phrase as
First they came for the murderers and I did not speak out ...
?
I don't think an argument of consistency really works here. Sure that has happened. And possibly in those countries they suffered consequences for their part in that. That does not mean they should not apply those principles in the US, in this instance. All these things are context specific, driven by judgement taking into account the whole circumstances.
It kills the argument that Parler is exclusively used for organizing violence although the insurrection part is where they will have a lot of trouble with specifically because they chose the worst possible place.
The problem is not that that's what it is "exclusively used for". The problem is that AWS asked them to moderate/remove content inciting/planning rape, torture and assassination of named public officials and others and Parler refused to do so.
In my opinion, things are working as expected. The US federal and state level governments are not supposed to regulate speech, per the US Constitution. In this case they are not regulating speech.
Private companies are regulating speech (in their applications, through their services and websites, etc.) as they are free to do under the US Constitution. While there may be a market for the speech Parler promotes and amplifies that market is not sufficiently large (in the opinion of these companies) to offset possible bad public relations or the loss of other customers.
I don't think there's any place for legislation that forces private companies to take a loss in this manner. It's clearly anti-free market and definitely anti-free speech, forcing Amazon to associate with speech they feel might harm the companies financial outlook.
Also, is it necessary? There are many BitTorrent tracker sites that are treated as illegal in the US and are still available. If Parler was really dedicated to keeping their website running they could surely do so. Maybe they won't have applications in the Apple App Store but that's not a right, is it? You have to have product that Apple feels helps the overall goal of their App Store, which is to make money for Apple.
"Private companies are regulating speech (in their applications, through their services and websites, etc.) as they are free to do under the US Constitution. "
Technically, there is no barrier that restricts a corporation from granting free space, so it isn't "free" to do so, moreso that it was not addressed because at the time of the framing of the constitution, the bigger dissenters of free speech were government, and religion, backed by government (or being the government.)
I disagree that this was an oversight of the of the US Constitution. Newspapers and books were both things when the US Constitution was written and, in all the years since, we haven't seen any amendments that would force a newspaper to print articles or letters that might cost them customers. Publishers are not forced to publish books that they feel might tarnish or otherwise harm their brands.
Indeed, it's my position that such laws would in fact be infringing on the free speech of those private companies. In addition they might cost those companies money, making these hypothetical laws also anti-free market.
While not an amendment, there certainly have been provisions to compel entities from providing a forum for sides they don't want to promote. [0] See also the now-repealed fairness doctrine. [1]
> do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech
Historically newspapers, television and radio have decided what is acceptable to be published through their media. There is no reason modern internet-based media should be any different.
Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.
Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.
Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.
> On one hand, Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. So it's no loss that it's gone, and it took far too long to deal with it. And just like I wouldn't bat an eye for AWS taking down an ISIS recruitment site, I don't really see any loss here.
(I'm going to leave aside the unfounded assertion that Parler was a "hate site." If it is, then every popular website is a "hate site," from Facebook and Google all the way down. Scores of prominent people who aren't hateful but for bizarre Left-wing constructions of the word "hate" use Parler to communicate with millions of people who are themselves not hateful conspiracy theorists.)
I always feel there's an unjustified logical jump on the part of authoritarian sentiments such as this. The argument seems to be, "X hosts hateful content that it refuses to remove. If we remove X, then we will have reduced hate."
This doesn't make much sense. Has anyone's mind actually changed because of Parler? It makes even less sense for conspiracy theories, where censorship makes conspiracy theorists feel like they're on the right track.
I remember looking up some moon landing hoaxer content on YouTube probably five to eight years ago. There was a lot of it on YouTube, but then YouTube also recommended some debunking videos (a few of which had been made specifically in response to the conspiracy theory videos themselves). The debunking videos were just frankly more persuasive. (The only issue with my little experiment was that the "Algorithm" recommended me conspiracy nonsense for a few weeks after.) There were no passive-aggressive, condescending propaganda boxes, no appeals to the authority of the media or legal system, no "fact checks." Just arguments for and against.
This is not to say that people can't do bad things with speech. We have stories like a random lynch mob forming in India over a viral series of videos shared via WhatsApp.[1] There are other stories like this. All are appalling. And technology has removed frictions that existed before to keep these things from happening.
But let's not forget that the world in which speech is restricted is much, much scarier. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was perpetrated by the most powerful members of Rwandan society, who used their monstrous power to slaughter Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus who spoke against the killings.
In the South under Jim Crow, speech was also violently suppressed with the aid of the states, who turned a blind eye to terrorist groups like the Klan going after black southerners or even white "race traitors" with lynching.
"Censorship, but only for the bad stuff" seems to be an unworkable system. People get riled up, and the consequences can be horrific, but they seem worse in a regime with heavy censorship that doesn't allow a safety valve for the bad ideas.
Lets not forget that Twitter just last month signed a new deal with Amazon to be hosted on AWS. Don't suppose this has anything to do with Amazon booting Twitter's largest competitor from the platform do you?
As for hateful rhetoric on Parler, that same hateful rhetoric exists on Twitter as well, don't fool yourself, it is only the fact that it is the left threatening the right that anyone allows it. Remember when Kathy Griffin held the bloody head of the President, or the current rise up and kill cops tweets you find everywhere on Twitter. Or the white people should all be dead tweets? Whether you agree to it or not does not therefore make hate speech. There is no clear cut defined line for hate speech to begin with. Anything can be declared hate speech, hell what I am saying now could be considered hate speech because I actually defend Parler and the people on its right to speech. At least then we can show examples of see this guy right here? He is a moron and believes in really dumb stuff. All they are doing by silencing these people is forcing them deeper underground where even more nefarious ideas and figures lie becoming more radicalized and more violent. But I guess that is what establishment wants, a perpetual idea to scare people with so that they give up even more freedom of thought.
> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?
And what did start-ups do before AWS et al? Didn't they 'just': rent a rack, fill it with computers, get an ASN/IP block, and make it accessible by DNS?
I understand it's more 'agile' to just spin up instances as needed, but are we in a place that the Old Way can no longer work? (At least theoretically.)
Doesn't Stack Overflow (still?) run on their own hardware?
> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech
Billionaires like the Mercer family, who fund Parler?
You're on a site run as part of the outreach for a VC firm where the owners are best buds with Peter Theil, Facebook board member, early Trump backer, a billionaire who literally hunted for a chance to sue a news organization out of existence because he didn't like a story they wrote about him; a site where a large number of the companies they fund and people who comment are intimately involved with AdTech and/or social media.
And you're only now noticing that billionaires have an unreasonable sway on discourse?
You didn't notice that not only does Rupert Murdoch own print press, book publishing, an TV all over the English-speaking world? You didn't notice the Mercer family also setting up Cambridge Analytica and being principal backers of Brexit?
anti trust action is needed against a few big tech firms, but this article for some reason frightens me. I dont understand the perspective and there seem to be contradictory undercurrents. I dont use any social network apps except occasionally browsing my couple of dozen friends feeds on my private Instagram account. I know Insta is not good, but I dont feel particularly threatened by it, since no discussion is ocurring (on my feed), just pictures and videos of music and places people have been, meals they have cooked.
I don't really care if Amazon crushes Parler. I also don't find back-doors, infiltration and R&D relationships with the government alarming or surprising. What matters to me is whether the government itself is corrupt.
I am a globalist and I do hope for more, not less integration between trade blocs. I think it would be beneficial to avoid the supply chain panic that underlies the extreme pursuit of labor cost arbitrage, but not in pursuit of national, but rather regional, balance of power and trade.
Surveillance is not going away. We cannot fight it. What can be combated is the willingness to harm others and the tendency to view others as separate from ourselves and as a danger to our interests.
But these tech firms are not yet absolute monopolies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, all display in my opinion anti-competitive and in some cases anti-consumer behaviour, but I think a new framework is needed to quantify harm in tech antitrust regulation.
I think Facebook is the most egregious offender because, as I have hyperbolically stated before, have constructed what amounds to a genocide machine. So while they are not "anti-consumer" in terms of price, they are anti-peace and stability of the system which hurts all of us. They disrupt the political process and not in a fun way.
Greenwald seems to be inviting pretty draconian anti-trust action, which would certainly be a bit controversial because some libertarians might not like it - ideologically the founders of Parler might be among them. On the other hand he seems to be stroking Parler as being some kind of underdog that is less bad somehow than other social networks. In my view Parler is only different in scale.
Again, Greenwald makes me very uneasy in this article because he comes out hard against "monopoly" but whose side is he on? I feel weird that I agree on paper that antitrust action is needed, but his article feels bought and paid for in some way.
While I generally disagree with Greenwald, he makes a good point here:
> So why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather than Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a flamboyant showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis?
"while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis"
I am not sure this is true? The point could have been made without resort to hyperbole stretching into disingenuousness. What about that other platform should not be the issue - social network apps/sites are all subject to and propagate abuse.
Democratic politicians have been hounding Facebook and YouTube since 2016.
Perhaps you mean why did we focus so much of our efforts on a single website? In this very moment, it's because this website was used to coordinate the efforts of a national group of potential terrorists. The pot boiled hard and fast.
Charlottesville was a proving ground. Trump's singing to white nationalists, violence against "the other side", casualti(es).
In this particular case Trump directly ordered the attack. (At first I put quotes on order and attack, but alas no quotes needed, it's what it is.) But he has been flaring these flames since ... that fucking birth certificate dog whistle.
The question is, was this an exception, or they changed policy, and will they start to enforce similar rules with regards to those bigger platforms/groups?
No, this is not a good point. Parler is a one-purpose app that existed solely (and was moderated by its own employees) to foment a chamber of hateful, violent rhetoric. Facebook and YouTube are used for many things by many people. Also Facebook and YouTube remove those kinds of content (even if they don't do a great job of it, they spend a whole lot of money employing a lot of people to get rid of it). Parler moderators removed those people who disagreed with the violent MAGA rhetoric. They're just not comparable, and pretending they are is ridiculous.
I signed up and used Parler and I was never hateful or violent. Its purpose was not that but to have a place where conservative voices (or anyone for that matter) could speak freely without the risk of being silenced by Twitter, Facebook etc. because your views didn't align with the left.
Can you give some (just 1 is fine) examples of people being silenced because their views didn't align with the left? I have yet to see a single one. I see people that were silenced for
- Denying the current covid-sars-2 pandemic
- Direct calls to violence
I have seen people that were "fact-checked" (which is itself discussion, not silencing) for claiming that the 2020 election result is fraudulent.
None of this is silencing because your views don't align with the left. If you believe covid is a hoax created by George Soros or that Bill Gates bought votes in the 2020 election, your views don't align with reality.
Milo had a book deal and was scheduled to speak at CPAC until someone uncovered a podcast of him defending the molestation of 13 year olds as a normal coming of age ritual.
I am not sure whether to assume you have not researched how he lost his platform or if you feel that defending molestation is "views that don't align with the left".
Seems like the example meets your criteria. There was nothing in his statements that were inherently illegal and so cancelling him for legal speech is an example of the Left's overreach among silicon valley decision-makers. This article[1] mentions more such far-right personalities that were banned for more traditional far-right views.
Milo losing his book deal was not chosen by "the Left" or "silicon valley decision-makers" as they are not the publishing company. People have lost book deals for much less. Such is business. He lost his Twitter and Facebook for harassing people and his official Youtube is doing just fine.
> Traditional far-right views
Can you give an example of a traditional far-right view any of the 3 people in the article were banned for?
The article mentions Alex Jones and Laura Loomer. They were taken off of social media repeatedly encouraging followers to harass people (mobbing). Encouraging/organizing mobbing will even get you banned from 4chan. The number of sites that allow such behavior is exceedingly low, and Alex Jones got several chances to stop before being taken off of youtube and facebook.
I have no problem with losing a book deal when you say something that endangers your ability to sell books. Regarding social media, I was referring to him being banned from Facebook for unspecific reasons[1]
Regarding Laura Loomer, her twitter ban doesn't appear to constitute harassment by any reasonable definition[2]. Even if we grant she harassed Omar on twitter, that doesn't justify being banned from payment processors, uber, and food delivery services[3].
Milo was not defending molestation, context matters. If anyone that has made stupid statements in the past should be removed from social media then it's time to just shut it all down.
"I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim. Between the ages of 13 and 16, two men touched me in ways they should not have," he began a news conference in Manhattan. "This isn’t how I wanted my parents to find out about this either.”
"My experiences as a victim led me to believe I could say almost anything on the subject, no matter how outrageous," he said. “I do not advocate for illegal behavior...I believe the age of consent is right.”
No, Milo did defend molestation, and then he took it back and apologized for it.
Although I think Milo is rude, bigoted, and unapologetic, he is a victim, and I agree that he should have plenty of latitude to speak on the subject. What he said in the podcast was inappropriate, and based on his apology, Milo seems to agree.
"The law is probably about right. It's probably roughly the right age; it's probably about okay. But there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age. I certainly consider myself to be one of them." - Milo Yiannopoulos
The reason Parler is popular in the first place is because YouTube and Facebook are no longer viable options for this kind of hate speech. That fight already concluded.
"Yet American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism" you had me up to this point. Liberals don't swoon for this any more than they do for a mandatory curfew to curb coronavirus cases. The powers of SV are a lot and I would hope that out of the ashes of the last four years we get a) a more progressive Conservative party and b) a more diversified collection of service providers, to combat AWS, and the like.
All of these companies, for what it's worth, seems to only use their power when its socially acceptable. For instance, they continue to abide by restrictive Chinese laws for the benefit of money. I'm convinced they will submit to the will of the state in Poland as well, where freedom of speech appears to mean something entirely different.
This is the beginning of the end for America. Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with what someone says, a free society depends on freedom of expression. It's the first right in the Bill of Rights for a good reason. Layers and layers of legal loopholes make politically biased corporate censorship perfectly legal. I weep for those whose livelihood depends on social media and e-commerce, because they now must live in fear of having their lives destroyed for expressing an opinion. Or for no reason at all.
boohoo - if I have to be afraid of half the country putting me on a kill list because of what they read on social media, then people who peddle poison via social media - including the social media firms themselves - should be as uncomfortable as me and my family.
To me, the worldview where half the population of the country are mindless zombies that can be remotely controlled through their social media feed and need to be shepherded by Uncle Faang just to prevent them from killing people is even bleaker than GP's perspective.
This is a really bad take. This country has never accepted calls for violent overthrow of our democratic system as "freedom of expression", and that's a view that's been upheld by all three branches of government across all eras of our history from the founding (Shays Rebellion?) through the Civil War (which definitively settled that armed rebellion is not a permissible way to settle political differences) through World War I (which defined our current laws about sedition and restrictions on the freedoms in the First Amendment) to the present day. You don't have a right to force anyone else -- individuals or private corporations -- to amplify your views, and you certainly don't have a right to incite violence or rebellion even on your own dime.
EDIT: This would be a less bad take if Parler had been booted just because people on the platform voted for Trump, but to be clear: Parler was booted because it was used to organize an armed rebellion with the explicit goal of finding and executing members of Congress certifying a democratic vote, and its users have been encouraging people to feed Democrats' families into woodchippers while making them watch.
No one is defending calls for violent overthrow, but typically we hold the people that have actually committed the acts responsible. Here, we're shifting the responsibility a level above with the sentiment that "this happened on your platform, so you have a duty to moderate". The kicker is that these tech giants employed the polar opposite of this philosophy for the majority of their existence to eschew as much responsibility as possible for their users' content.
Let's see. If I go and organize a violent insurrection using GMail, what does Google need to do to comply with it's own philosophy here? It seems that it needs to start scanning all emails for inciting violence and send them to a moderation queue. Of course, it's never going to do any of that, because unlike Parler it doesn't have any overlords holding it by the neck.
Google, Apple, and Amazon like to do whatever they can get away with when it comes to anti-competitive practices, and enjoy the protections granted to them as private entities. On the other hand, this shows that they're willing to also take unilateral action to silence millions of people, based on nothing more than a whim and a holier-than-thou attitude. There's a messy contradiction here. They're not subject to having to abide by the 1st amendment because they're private companies, but in practice they're in control of the majority of public discourse. This is a big problem.
And this returns me to what I think was a big point in the article. The response to any free-speech concerns has been: "if you don't like Facebook or Google's policies, you're free to create your own." But the sway of FB/Google's policies is no longer just over their own content, but also the platforms they manage. Which as it turns out, form the majority of the infrastructure of the internet.
> Layers and layers of legal loopholes make politically biased corporate censorship perfectly legal.
What loopholes? The 1st amendment protects you from being persecuted by the government for your speech. It does not require private entities to publish, promote, transmit, or broadcast your speech. Similarly, discrimination is legal in the US. It is only illegal to discriminate against members of protected classes on the basis of them being members of those protected classes. Political affiliation is not a protected class.
Anyone that wants to spout off abhorrent things on the internet is free to do so. However, no private entity can be forced to allow such behavior. You do not have a right to have your tweet published by Twitter. You do not have a right to store your bits on an Amazon server.
> And in part it is because the Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them by silencing their adversaries.
The Biden Administration is getting stuffed with corporate executives and lobbyists of all kinds. If that alleged quote about fascism being the merger of corporate and state power, then congratulations, fascists! You won.
And if that quote is wrong, this situation is still bad, way worse than Trump.
How this cesspool got built is a metaphor for the wingnuts who used it.
Most of us here know - if you want a resilient, censorship-free service, you can still: buy your own physical servers, rent data centre space (or a garage), buy multiple transit pipes to ensure traffic can get to them from a variety of places. You can move your servers around if you have to and keep your sovereignty despite everything else changing. It's how the internet was designed! Amazon, Google, Apple and most other private companies can go whistle if they want you offline.
Sure it takes expertise, time, expense, negotiation... but that's the price of true freedom, internet patriots!
Instead they built everything on top of the conveniences and goodwill of a single US company, with no backup plan. Hardly living in the wild west - and that's this mob down to a tee. Rich, well-connected dorks who desperately need the society they organise to tear down - why be surprised when the society hits back in such a tiny way as terminating their AWS account?
Reminds me of all the libertarians who flocked to Bitcoin because it was considered a way to circumvent the government, and then realized that a) you need governments to run the pipes, b) much of the mining is done by conglomerates and c) the unregulated market is about as stable as a ship at sea
If Rosa Parks didn't like sitting in the back of the bus, she could have just started her own bus line!
If GMC wouldn't sell her a bus, she could just make her own!
Sure it takes expertise, time, expense, negotiation... but that's the price of true freedom!
Before anyone comes crying: I in no way support the assault on the Capitol, calls to violence (which should be illegal), alt-right ethno-state madness, Qanon delusions etc. Nazism is a cancer on society.
> If Rosa Parks didn't like sitting in the back of the bus,
Buses are run by governments. And Rosa Parks wasn't advocating throwing molotov cocktails at bus drivers, she sat in the wrong damn seat in an act of civil disobedience.
> If GMC wouldn't sell her a bus,
It'd be great if GMC would refuse selling vehicles to insurrectionist militias, IMHO.
"The Montgomery City Lines is sorry if anyone expects us to be exempt from any state or city law ... [w]e are sorry that the colored people blame us for any state or city ordinance which we didn't have passed."
Not only that, Rosa Parks was discriminated because of who she was while the MAGA goons and the platform they used are receiving backlash for behaving like pos and refusing to moderate the violent posts.
The parent poster is deliberately muddying the water with the twisted analogy.
> Rosa Parks wasn't advocating throwing molotov cocktails at bus drivers, she sat in the wrong damn seat in an act of civil disobedience.
Agreed. But because some others didn't take her approach to civils rights, but were violent, why should she be canceled? It would be interesting to ask people at that time in history whether they saw her actions as violence or inciting violence. I bet the answer is a big ol' yes. I bet even many thought it was inciting the overthrow society/government.
> If Rosa Parks didn't like sitting in the back of the bus, she could have just started her own bus line!
Or she and like minded people could have boycotted the bus lines, in modern terms "cancelling" them. (In case any non-US users don't know, that's exactly what they did, it was called the "Montgomery Bus Boycott").
Ironically, racists in those days tried to use the government to shut that movement down, just like Republicans are trying to use the government to go after people cancelling Parler today.
In the USA, there are many kinds busses that are not public transit. Greyhound and Trailways were historically the most famous, but there are still lots of long and intermediate distance services (i.e. not just shuttling you around a town) that are still completely private bus services. Today, Megabus and Bolt would be contemporary examples. They are subject to some regulation as a kind of "public transportation", but their services, facilities, investment and staff are in any significant way controlled by governments.
There is a significant difference between refusing business on the basis of race (which is rightfully a protected status) and refusing business with a platform that hosts far-right content. This particular example, comparing the far-right to Rosa Parks, is especially distasteful.
Call them and ask! They may punt you to one of their customers if you just want a U or 2.
If you plan on your own AS and IP space - full network independence - ask which carriers are there, and plan on a quarter or half rack for a router. You'd also need to become a member of your regional Internet registry (e.g. ARIN in the US) and ask them for resources - e.g. IP space and an AS number.
This line is exactly why ISPs should be treated as a utility and not be allowed to deny service to anyone except in special circumstances. Many people depend on the internet for their livelihoods (like me!) and denying them access at their home is almost akin to an electric company denying someone access to the grid.
Please make your substantive points without posting in the flamewar style. We're trying to avoid the latter here because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for: curious, thoughtful conversation about interesting things.
When accounts build up a track record of flamewar, snark, political/ideological battle, and other things that break the site guidelines, we ban them. We have to, because otherwise this place will be engulfed by hellfire and then become scorched earth. Those things may be exciting and/or activating for a while, but they're not interesting.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site to heart, we'd be grateful. You can still express your views in that spirit, as many other HN users have been showing.
Wow, just keep getting downvoted because I think we should be allowed to criticize and discuss big tech decisions on the biggest community for tech. Thanks!
I simply don't care. Sure, there's slippery slope arguments and discussions to be had about who gets to decide what is and isn't acceptable speech.
Right now though there's a small group of people looking to cause harm and damage using tools that barely existed 10 years ago and our laws won't keep up. Antisemitism and racism have no place in the world and private companies have no business profiting from its proliferation. Silicon Valley wants to use its power to make it harder for people with those views to meet, organize and share their views? Crack on.
I will use my limited resources and time on this planet to cry for someone else.
He's using hyperbole to make the argument an emotional one rather than using reason. I'm not sure if he even knows he's doing it or not, the tactic of hyperbole has become so prevalent in today's political discussions.
This is about morality, not legality (which is often perverted anyway).
Hate speech translates into hateful actions, case in point was on display in the US Capitol last week.
This is challenging territory but to frame this as a free speech issue without acknowledging that there are limits to such is not being entirely honest about the matter.
I think this is generally right. We tend to focus on the one side of the slippery slope which is "descent into an Orwellian dystopia", but the other side of the logical extreme is what, that no matter what private companies aren't allowed to remove and censor certain things on their forums?
Like you said, if there were an app where 90% of the conversation was about child pornography, no one would cry "1984" if it's removed by Apple. So we're just having a conversation about where the line should be and if hate speech and planning insurrection should meet that standard, not beginning a rapid descent into thought control.
>So we're just having a conversation about where the line should be and if hate speech and planning insurrection should meet that standard, not beginning a rapid descent into thought control.
It obviously is. It started with child pornography which most everyone can agree on banning, now you are suggesting we apply the same ban to political discussion. That's the definition of a slippery slope in action.
> The market decided they wanted nothing to do with it.
I don't think this means what you think it means, because it doesn't appear true.
The market usually means 'the free market' i.e. raw consumer demand - 'are people buying it?', 'vote with your wallet' e.t.c., By all accounts it looked like the market did want it - because they had a rapidly growing user base. Left to the free market, Parler would have continued.
The market does not mean the CEO's of other tech companies want nothing to do with it. It also does not mean that popular opinion is that it's bad.
You do need a better argument, because you're changing the entire point of the platform.
One is speech - maybe hate, maybe political, maybe both - and one is distribution of illegal products of child abuse. They're not the same thing. They're not "equally odious" and honestly it's pretty gross you'd even pretend they are.
You will care when the other side is able to do the same thing to us. I'm not necessarily talking about racists either. This seems great until it's used against us.
For example, I don't recall FOSTA/SESTA and its ramifications generating anywhere close to this level of breathless outrage on HN. The leftists I know (actual leftists, not the USA's conflation of centrist ideals with leftism) are all already very intimate with getting targeted and censored. Who is the "us" whose unfiltered work/speech/views have always been guaranteed a platform?
For that specific comment, "us" refers to people who do not like racists or anyone in support of storming our nation's capital. Can't say I like parler either. However, I will defend their right of free speech and expression.
> For example, I don't recall FOSTA/SESTA and its ramifications generating anywhere close to this level of breathless outrage on HN.
You shouldn't rely on memory. It tends to fail everyone. Search engines are better
> Silicon Valley wants to use its power to make it harder for people with those views to meet, organize and share their views? Crack on.
No, they should not be doing that. It shouldn't even be legal for Silicon Valley to do that. I don't care that you describe the people being censored as having negative traits, that is your political opinion.
Why shouldn't it be legal? What right do you have to say to AWS "you have to host my website?"
I am a free speech absolutist but that doesn't mean you have a right to force others to endorse, host, or amplify your speech. Just that you shouldn't go to jail for it.
That's fine when there are alternatives. The fact that Parler isn't back online shows that there is an oligopoly in place. The point of the first amendment in the first place was to stop those with overwhelming political power preventing those they didn't like from speaking.
What this entire episode has shown is that capitalism's ability to offer alternatives is being stymied by network effects. In the USA that used to bring out the Anti-Trust big stick.
Parler can be shut down when it has been shown to have breached legislation passed by the country and has been found guilty of that in a court of law after due process.
It's not just free speech that is at issue here. It is innocent until proven guilty and due process. All of which are Human Rights issues. Or at least used to be.
> It's not just free speech that is at issue here. It is innocent until proven guilty and due process. All of which are Human Rights issues. Or at least used to be.
Due process is inefficient and slow compared to letting unelected mega-corps determine what other businesses can exist and what speech can and can't be heard.
Imagine how awful a system with a 'burden-of-proof' and 'oversight' would be compared to just trusting the invisible hand of the market and profit motives determine the optimum course of action! Adam Smith proved that it would all work out fine anyway - there was a graph with some curves that proved it I think.
Now if only we had a way to merge all these mega-companies into one, bigger super-mega-corp. Imagine how much better that would be! Hopefully over time with market consolidation we can achieve anything.
AWS has alternatives in 1) Azure; 2) GCP; 3) Any number of smaller VPS providers; 4) self-hosted infrastructure; 5) co-location, which sometimes (often?) has different requirements compared to virtualization re: content.
> The fact that Parler isn't back online shows that there is an oligopoly in place.
It shows that they have mediocre-at-best technical talent in place, which isn't all that surprising given the content and target market.
> Parler can be shut down when it has been shown to have breached legislation passed by the country and has been found guilty of that in a court of law after due process.
This may be what you want, but it's not reality so I wouldn't frame it as a definitive fact like this.
> It's not just free speech that is at issue here.
It's not a free speech issue at all. Free speech means you can't be jailed or persecuted by the government for your speech.
> It is innocent until proven guilty and due process.
You're conflating a misunderstanding of Constitutional rights with criminal law. Due process is 100% irrelevant.
I think the argument is that the fact these services represent a monopoly that means they shouldn't have absolute power on who gets to use their platform.
The world is better without Parler, and it will be better if the most vicious from that platform have trouble finding megaphones for their atrocious speech.
Buuuuuut I hope the larger community takes this as a cautionary tale about being completely beholden to single entities - whether that's AWS, or Facebook, or even larger entities such as "Silicon Valley" that are grouped by ideology - that you may agree with today, but not tomorrow.
Ok, so the barrier to entry to building a business is now that I need to get all my customers to be aware of two domains, get all my customers to use Tor and to host my own DNS (presumably in a makeshift datacenter in my bedroom?).
Well the lesson here is that you shouldn't build your castles on other people's land. None of this is new. Sex sites have had this problem for decades. Cannabis companies can't use popular payment providers. If there's really a lucrative market on AWS for Extremists, then the market will provide.
On the contrary, people have generally been smart enough to not do business with companies that won't want to do business with them (for example, nobody is really sure where the various [\d]chans are hosted, and Pornhub self-hosts). There are any number of actually competent people on the left, the right and orthogonal to politics that aren't visibly getting denied "critical infrastructure" because they simply knew better than to use it in the first place; what we are really witnessing is rather entitled people realising they're not guaranteed a ready-made popular platform (whether for an individual's speech or for an app's deployment). The lack of guarantee of a platform itself is far from news.
The fact is, right wing is present on Twitter, Facebook, reddit just fine.
What is not present are their radical wings, which were kicked away just like leftist violent radicals. Difference is that at least so far, mainstream left is ok with those being kicked.
It is possible to think that SV has too much power AND that they still have the right to deem what is acceptable on their own services.
You can be entitled to free speech without being entitled to a platform or an audience. Despite how much HN loves to bash on SV big tech, this isn't 1984 and there are plenty of other ways to spread hate if that's what you really want to support.
I'm growing really weary from all the slippery-slope/everything-is-being-censored/what-aboutism alarmist arguments.
There is quite a large spectrum between "any and all speech is acceptable, on the platform of your choosing" and "total censorship". Let's stop pretending its a binary choice.
It's not a slippery slope any more. We already fell off and it just happens that the immediate casualty is Parler. But real victims are not far behind (in fact, they already exist, they are just not important enough).
It's legitimate concern that we have passed new thresholds of power, that the power can be exercised, and there's not much anyone affected can do about it.
Furthermore, it's disturbing how much those in power think -- and act -- alike. Isn't it weird that nobody has really broken ranks here?
I think (hope) everyone would agree that antisemitism and racism have no place in the world. And it's easy not to care when you earnestly believe the ends justify the means.
But in practice, the risk is that these labels will be applied much more liberally by self-interested parties precisely because they are unquestionably bad and hard to refute. If power hungry forces have access to a weapon which can be used to shut down discourse with no due process, it will most assuredly be used and create undesirable outcomes.
IMO we should all take issue with the ability of a small oligopoly to take these actions without any legal due process or recourse. History shows us that this kind of power without restriction in the hands of very few will lead to abuses.
No one sheds a tear for Parlor, but lets also be clear about this, the social media companies just showed a token of conscience and it doesn't mean anything. They still didn't boot people like Cruz, Hawley and Gaetz and the numerous others still inciting the insurrection. I am sure they will not boot these lawmakers as they will face retaliation if they do. I don't trust the change of heart they are showing.
> No one sheds a tear for Parlor, but lets also be clear about this, the social media companies just showed a token of conscience and it doesn't mean anything. They still didn't boot people like Cruz, Hawley and Gaetz and the numerous others still inciting the insurrection.
If following a constitutional process for protesting a State's results in a presidential election is "inciting the insurrection", somebody better start fitting Nancy Pelosi for an orange jumpsuit: https://www.c-span.org/video/?185005-2/debate-ohio-electoral...
> Didn’t realize people on HN rationalize sedition and insurrection too.
It's not sedition or insurrection to wait your turn and speak out in Congress that the results for a State are invalid. That's exactly what the Constitution stipulates you should do. It wasn't a crime or an insurrection when Pelosi did it and it's not a crime now.
If you want a word to describe then versus now I'd go with hypocrisy.
On the wider topic, it's sad that people's biases have become so blatant against others with different political views that they interpret every comment in the most disingenuous light, with the dumbest of assumptions. One does not have to call out "Violence is bad!" in every comment or statement that they make for it to be true. It should be assumed as that's the default for any sane individual in modern society.
So, yes violence is bad. We all know that. But unless you can show me where Cruz or Hawley actually committed acts of violence or directly instructed people to do the same, talk of them being guilty of insurrection is totally out of line. If telling your supporters to "March to the capital and make your voices heard!" is an insurrection we're not going to have room in our prisons.
I am going to take your argument in good faith. People form their beliefs thinking its the right thing.
So, this is exactly how leaders want you to think. I suggest reading up on how coups happen and how the leaders in those situations use the media and exactly what they say and how they say it. We have a lot of examples in this world and they have been very well documented too. Also in these cases its irrefutable evidence once the coup has happened who the bad guys are, so the books will not be controversial.
Here is a book to look at if you want - Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.
Lots of "Libertarians" with bad hyprocrisy in constantly bringing up "free speech." Yet the same people cheer for Christian Bakeries that refuse to serve gay couples.
And those people trying to claim these tech companies are "utilities" are insane. There is a 0% chance that any tech company is going to be declared a utility in the next several decades in the US and to think otherwise is totally absurd. So those arguments just hold no water.
It's called a boycott. It's not a "monopolistic force" when they're many different companies ranging from lawyers and accountants to cloud providers and app stores.
Boycott: "withdraw from commercial or social relations with (a country, organization, or person) as a punishment or protest."
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 458 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
AWS is great the servers you run. Those can be anywhere on earth, including physically located at your business
In this instance, a platform decides, effectively "we refuse to host your ideas, go elsewhere." Facebook and Google and Twitter aren't going out of their way to scrub these people off the internet; they are just kicking them off their own platform.
You might consider this part of the "cancel culture", but it's not censorship.
In this case, Twitter et al. thought a LOT about what to do, as they did very little for 4 year's of Trump's presidency, and only decided to act after Trump incited a literal self-coup and insurrection with the goal of illegitimately keeping himself in power.
If in the future "those who think completely differently from me" are going to think liberal ideas are so dangerous to be removed, it won't matter what "standard" we set today. It seems even with the highest standard of "don't support open coups", you still think I will be judged the exact same.
Censorship is bad. But insurrections against legitimate governments are worse.
Truth is it was good PR to obliterate Parler for everyone involved and they weren't a big enough player to be able to fight back.
Also, it's worth looking at some of the hacked info that was released - Parler had a serious moderation system, but it was used to make sure people had MAGA viewpoints, not to prevent violence. This is not some free and open platform, it was a controlled one that purposely built an echo chamber of violent rhetoric. Twitter and Facebook don't allow the same kind of violent rhetoric, lies, etc., and while they may not do an ideal (or even good) job at it, the fact is they're broad platforms used for a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people and are absolutely not comparable to Parler.
You must not be paying much attention..this is simply not true
Also, during the riots of 2020, it was extremely common to find calls to violence in twitter that weren't deleted.
They are perfectly within their rights as a private business to make those exceptions. Is it fair? No. Would we much rather they apply things consistently? Yes.
The question is, do we want to enforce who and what they can and cannot allow on their platform via law, or do we want private businesses to control who they are allowed to do business with?
Cool, can we agree thats incredibly dumb?
These free-speech advocates still have the ability to create mastodon instances or a listserv or something else where a company doesn't have that leverage over them. They still have options and this crying is overblown.
If anything, we should be more bothered that people consider something like AWS or any of the other major clouds, core infrastructure akin to backhaul or electricity. (Google Play and the App Store have always had very clear TOS rules that limit certain types of content so I don’t even see them as being part of the discussion.)
I fundamentally agree that something like Parler, as abhorrent as much of its content was, has the right to exist somewhere on the internet, but I just as fundamentally disagree that Amazon should be forced to provide them with services or that we should equate having a right to exist with “having the right to exist on X’s brand of compute.”
What a store can’t do (at least in the US), is say, “we won’t let you shop here because your skin color is this, or you’re from this part of town, or you practice this religion, or are this sexual orientation.” Now, if a person who matches one of those descriptions and chooses to violate rules and screams at people in the middle of the store, they can be denied service for that reason, just not on the basis of their race or religion, etc.
Parler violated AWS’s terms of service. I’m not going to be obtuse pretend that the type of political ideology that Parler actively seeks out/evangelizes/caters to, doesn’t make them a target, of course it does. That doesn’t negate the fact that the TOS was violated and there was no real plan of action from excising content that violated Amazon’s TOS from the platform. (Although I want to be clear, getting a bunch of conservative celebrities and Fox News hosts on your platform as a way to try to buy respectability doesn’t mean that the rhetoric extolled by Parler CEO and championed by the service is mainstream or even mainstream conservative. Parler was/is a place that was not about free speech but about pro-Trump speech; dissenters were banned from the service, which is Parler’s right, but it was hardly a “free speech” platform.)
Again, I’m not arguing Parler doesn’t have the right to exist. But I am arguing that AWS shouldn’t be obligated to host it. I’m also arguing that as big as AWS and the other clouds are, they are not yet at the point of being true pieces of immovable infrastructure. And honestly, I hope they never are. Even those of us who don’t shed any tears for Parler, probably agree that we don’t want to live in a world where the only options for hosting a website or app belong to a FAANG.
If it were an issue of an ISP or a backhaul provider denying access to the service, I would be the very first person criticizing and standing up to the action. But that’s not what happened here. Someone came into a store without shoes, without a shirt, without a mask, screaming in the face of the employees and other customers. They aren’t allowed to shop at that store anymore. But a store that might be a little further away is still an option.
We need to stop pretending like everyone's viewpoint is equal and we shouldn't exclude people for what they believe. Violent racists should be ostracized and pushed out of society. People who choose to have those kinds of beliefs are a constant threat to the safety of people around them.
Now obviously it's a blurry line, but again, the neo-Nazis storming the capital and their ilk are just way over the line. Just because it's blurry doesn't mean we have to pretend it doesn't exist out of some sense of fairness.
> We need to stop pretending like everyone's viewpoint is equal and we shouldn't exclude people for what they believe. Violent racists should be ostracized and pushed out of society. People who choose to have those kinds of beliefs are a constant threat to the safety of people around them.
I will hard disagree with this every day of the week. To me this is a clear example of how ideology has taken the place of religion in today's society. It's no longer enough for you to be civil and respect the laws, but even having the wrong thoughts is considered criminal, just like lust and envy are considered sinful in religion.
We're heading in a dark direction if we're re-adopting the same principles and perspectives that were behind McCarthyism, let alone used to burn witches and conduct the Inquisition.
And this would be an issue if we were actually talking about government action, but we are talking about private individuals deciding who they will associate with. When the government gets involved then you have reason for concern, but if this is private parties engaging in commerce you have absolutely no leg to stand on.
(cue the desperate, too-cute-by-half arguments "but are they REALLY inciting violence?")
It's a bad faith argument, yet it's everywhere. I'd think HN would be better than that, yet here we are, having the same fight every time free speech is the topic.
Also note that the parent mentioned "government action" whereas the GP is referring to a business taking action. The distinction is incredibly important, yet so many free-speech purists respond to corporate action as if it was a government action.
Less sarcastically, do you agree that the amplification of thought and rhetoric possible using social media isn't something that was considered 500 years ago? i.e. having wrong thoughts isn't dangerous, but having 75 million followers and pushing your wrong thoughts on them is dangerous. It isn't thoughts any longer - it's an action.
Speech is a kind of action, isn't it?
Well then it's a good thing being kicked out of a bar isn't "prosecution".
The US tends to bias towards letting market pressures take care of this sort of thing, and then stepping in if there are enough high-profile cases of failure.
There are also a bunch of edge cases that I think most people would be ok with. There are conservative-only dating sites. I wouldn't be allowed on the platform, but that doesn't really bother me. If there was a republican-only grocery store, that gets sketchy. And if there was a democrat-only government program, that would clearly be illegal.
It depends on the context.
Political affiliation is a protected class for employment in some states[0].
Political affiliation is a protected class for accommodations such as grocery stores in DC[1] and Madison, Wisconsin[2].
[0] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/discrimin...
[1] https://ohr.dc.gov/protectedtraits
[2] https://library.municode.com/wi/madison/codes/code_of_ordina...
In Parler's case, the issue isn't that they are conservative. The issue is that they refuse to take any responsibility for the hate and violence on their platform. John Matze had every opportunity to take responsibility for the content, but he was vocal that he would not do anything about it.
If I were running a cloud provider company, I wouldn't want anything to do with this behavior either. Who cares whether the users lean right or left - hate and violence are unacceptable.
That surprises me. "Political opinion" is not a protected class [1] in most jurisdictions in the US, and I assume that the same holds for whatever the local equivalent is to protected class. Especially considering that a lot of European countries also have laws that prohibit Holocaust denial--which are unconstitutional in the US per the 1st Amendment.
[1] Protected class, in US discrimination law jargon, is an attribute that you cannot legally use to discriminate against. The usual protected classes are sex, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, age, sexual orientation, and gender identity, although there is some variation from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (e.g., military service is protected in my state).
There are other laws that prevent business owners from denying people entry or removing somebody from their store or similar (see Supreme Court decision NJA 1995 s. 84). They can’t even prevent people who have historically stolen from them from coming in and spending time in the store. But apparently they don’t have to do business with them. I thought they did.
There are other laws that prevent business owners from denying people entry or removing somebody from their store or similar (see Supreme Court decision NJA 1995 s. 84). They can’t even prevent people who have historically stolen from them from coming in and spending time in the store. But apparently they don’t have to do business with them. I thought they did.
Can a business in the US refuse you service if you're gay / black ?
Same argument applies.
Had Parler done this these companies wouldn’t have distanced themselves from them. But also their whole brand is enabling those accounts so had they blocked those accounts they wouldn’t have a community.
It's not about illegal content. It's about politics and ethics. (And private companies can choose to do or not do business with whomever they want - except a few protected things. But there's a gay wedding cake somewhere too in this. Free association and free speech. Ethically it's hard to coerce anyone to say or not say something, and to host or not host some content.)
Furthermore, there's the power imbalance aspect. Twitter banning SciHub is probably Twitter abusing its power, Twitter banning Trump is less likely an abuse. (Though there very well could be and are exceptions.)
By all means "deplatform" Facebook, please, but why would you condone that and condemn deplatforming Parler? makes no sense.
I've made this exact argument. It's a blatant double standard that Youtube or Twitter, as you said, aren't held liable for the content their users upload, but Amazon and Google can deplatform whoever they want for whatever they want.
I've read a joke that we're officially in a cyberpunk world now that corporations are "going to war" with each other. I've thought that our society has been heading towards civil war for years, but only in the past year with so many riots and corporate overreach have I started to believe it might actually come sooner than later.
It isn't perfect but they are actively and publicly doing so. Parler publicly seems to take the stance of no to little moderation. I haven't read the hacked info from the site on principle of how it was distributed/hacked but seems that data confirms it based on others notes in the thread
If its the latter, then lets continue to deplatform people. If its the former, then lets ban facebook, twitter et al given their proven history of allowing violence and hate speech and as an essential tool to organize mobs.
The logic here is terrible and you can't argue against that. No matter how many users parler gets, it won't even come close to having the same reach.
Sounds good to me... They're totally culpable for the domestic terrorism that happened at the capitol. Facebook too. Dogshit companies that track our behavior and make money off of outrage.
Compare that to Parler which has built its whole marketing image on "absolute free speech" which technically isn't legal and their platform's contents reflect that.
Parler is blatantly NOT trying to stop illegal material, the other platforms are at least trying to...
If you're trying really hard no to, but still facilitate 1000x the amount of violence (made up statistics), it doesn't matter. The real world results are what matter. At least, its what should matter.
Even at a moderately busy McDonalds there will be errors in your order. You can always go back and tell them to fix it and then you will wait... because they are busy filling new orders. And even after you waited there is a chance that they forgot about your fix, they remade it and it is still wrong, or something else happens.
This kind of stuff happens all the time in the real world. In fact, restaurants and food safety scores are the epitome of "try Olympics." You can have a rat in a kitchen in San Francisco and still not be immediately closed. But if you are making conscious efforts to remedy that, you can stay open and often have a long time to fix it.
Counter argument : twitter letting "Hang Mike Pence" trends.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-stops-hang-mike-pence-trend...
Parler likely had a much higher percentage of content advocating for violence, but youtube and twitter probably have hundreds or thousands of times the quantity and reach for the violence advocacy content they host.
This is really just a lesson about what happens when you squander your reputation and lose the presumption of good faith.
However, it’s far too late in the day for me to put together coherent thoughts. Perhaps others further west could try. Thanks, and buona notte.
Parlour used AWS property to allow its members to help organize sedition. AWS has the right to nope out.
All the problems with large private entities like Twitter and Facebook hosting speech on their own terms pale in to comparison with letting governments dictate how they host speech.
Parlour can find or create another hosting device and get back up quickly. If they want to use mainstream services, they should moderate out something other than liberals.
You've seen this play out in sports hundreds of times. Politics isn't any different. It's even got WWE-esque storylines.
https://www.wwe.com/superstars/donald-trump
However, I am going to worry more that it existed in the first place than it being destroyed.
But I don't feel the same way about AWS, because they are not as critical as an ISP would be. Nothing is stopping Parler from plugging in and managing their own servers. I see AWS as a convenience, and as such I don't think anyone is entitled to it.
As a side note: I would like to take a minute to remind the youngsters that no one owes them a revolution. If you want to go fight against the status quo, you should really have a plan for when the status quo fights back.
AWS cares because they're a public company with a reputation, and many of their customers and employees are anti-rioter.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
'On January 8, 2021, AWS brought concerns to Parler about user content that encouraged violence. Parler addressed them, and then AWS said it was “okay” with Parler.'
'The next day, January 9, 2021, AWS brought more “bad” content to Parler and Parler took down all of that content by the evening'
https://www.scribd.com/document/490405156/Parler-sues-Amazon
"AWS knew its allegations contained in the letter it leaked to the press that Parler was not able to find and remove content that encouraged violence was false—because over the last few days Parler had removed everything AWS had brought to its attention and more. Yet AWS sought to defame Parler nonetheless."
If you are going to run a site full of user content, you really need to read the rules you are agreeing to regarding what content services you depend on such as web hosting allows, and put in place mechanisms to keep your users from posting that kind of content and to find and remove it when it does get through.
We do have a big tech problem. Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, and Apple should be broken up. Twitter should be required to improve moderation and bot removal. Public/Private enterprises should be established to provide alternates to Twitter/Parler.
If so, when can I start hosting raves in your front room?
Freedom of speech is, colloquially, about being able to discuss things. That's something I'd like to support, and to see more of,
but I'm going to draw a stark categorization between discussion and incitement. Both use words, sure. Are both speech that should be free?
Edit: To be clear, not a rhetorical question: actual question, one I don't have an answer to.
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Onl...
1) You could be wrong. Numerous examples exist throughout history regarding the wrong opinion turning out to the be the truth.
2) Knowing wrong opinions makes you have greater understanding of the correct ones.
3) Roughly the expression argument you mention.
The right term in this case is an oligopoly.
Semantically it makes little difference though.
People want free speech. You get free speech so long as your speech doesn’t unduly impinge on other’s liberties. That is the trade off we accept when we exchange the rule of force for the rule of law in a self governing, democratic society.
People are not complaining about business practices. People are complaining about not being able to say whatever they want over whatever medium they want even if other people get dead.
Unless you're quite tech savvy, you can't sign up for Parler anymore by using a competitor. So, while I mostly disagree with Greenwald, I don't think this characterisation is unfair.
They didn't kill Parker though, we did. We made if clear that we wouldn't do business with companies that supported the worst of us. They complied with our demands to force them out of the public sphere and I applaud them for it. As an ex Googler and generally anti FAANG, I don't have many fond words for them but I support this action. For the most part, I even approve of the timeline: let garbage peddling monsters be garbage peddling monsters until they do real damage and then cut them off.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25745908
The mental gymnastics of the people defending Parler on here are wild. If Parler was a community of ISIS or any non-white non-christian extremists none of y’all would be insisting on Apple or Amazon’s requirement to do business with them and be complicit.
[1]: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...
'Amazon.com Inc.'s AMZN, Amazon Web Services announced Tuesday that Twitter Inc. would be using its cloud services to support its delivery of users' timeliness.'
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/aws-says-twitter-will-use-...
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/isis_tw...
Not true. AWS has been working with Parler for "several weeks" [0] to help it comply with their TOS. Not only did they fail to remove the posts Amazon provided, the calls for violence on their platform got worse during that time.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
That's why I asked about members of Parler still being able to "use" AWS through other AWS-hosted services. I don't get what you're driving at.
> AWS isn't responsible for them.
Again, I'm not sure I understand what point this is responding to. No one is claiming AWS is responsible for the capital hill folks. They are claiming that Parler bears some responsibility and did so in such a way that violated AWS' policies. So AWS banned them.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25748097
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934
This is a very typical of the drivel from the pro censorship crowd. Not even an attempt to formulate any coherent principle, just acccusations of bad faith, hypocrisy and racism, without any evidence whatsoever. This is the top comment as I'm writing this. This is apparently the best defense they have to offer.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall
There were open calls for murder and violence. This not protected speech even if it was in a genuinely public forum.
This is the accusation without evidence that I'm talking about. It's not an accusation against random parler users, but an accusation against those of us who do not think that AWS should decide what's allowed on the internet.
The value of Twitter isn't really that you can post and view small snippets of text. It's that they've developed technology that allows them to effectively moderate.
Any poorly moderated site eventually becomes associated with the right.
As improbable as it sounds there are people who would much rather live in a world where people are judged on the basis of their character, instead of a race and gender based purity spiral, and those indeed constituted the majority of the Parler userbase when I spent some short time there.
But: there are open calls for murder and violence on literally every internet forum. I've seen them on hackernews even!
The US Capitol got breached and looted by deranged insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021. There was a guy walking with a Confederate flag inside the building. And they were all supported and incited by many prominent conservative figures, including current politicians. Including the President himself.
What other evidence do you need that these people have been acting on bad faith, hypocrisy and racism?
This is the accusation of bad faith, hypocrisy and racism that I'm talking about. It's not an accusation against random parler users, but an accusation against those of us who do not think that AWS should decide what's allowed on the internet.
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-sav...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/us/trump-speech-riot.html
“Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder. …
“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”
“I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so, because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. … And I actually — I just spoke to Mike. I said: ‘Mike, that doesn’t take courage. What takes courage is to do nothing. That takes courage.’”
“I also want to thank our 13 most courageous members of the U.S. Senate, Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Ron Johnson, Senator Josh Hawley. … Senators have stepped up. We want to thank them. I actually think, though, it takes, again, more courage not to step up, and I think a lot of those people are going to find that out. And you better start looking at your leadership, because your leadership has led you down the tubes.”
“We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal. …
“You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen. These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media. It’s all part of the suppression effort. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it. …
“We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
---
This is incitement, pure and simple. I mean, look at this shit:
"We will never give up. We will never concede."
"You will have an illegitimate president... and we can't let that happen."
"...if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
What else do you need? Are you looking for instances where Trump told the crowd to attack and breach the Capitol before you're convinced that he's guilty?
Your case would be much stronger had Trump not explicitly said people should go "peacefully".
"We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong." -- In context, he is saying: "Cheer for the Republicans in congress, maybe not so much for the ones who aren't backing me because they aren't showing strength" -- nothing about that seems like it is incitement.
Yet somehow Democrats saying worse things is applauded. Compare that to where actual violence is implied: "If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere." - Maxine Waters "Go to the Hill today. Please, get up in the face of some congresspeople." - Cory Booker "We owe the American people to be there for them, for their financial security, respecting the dignity and worth of every person in our country, and if there is some collateral damage for some others who do not share our view, well, so be it, but it shouldn’t be our original purpose." - Nancy Pelosi
This is what it feels like to live in a country like China, where if you criticize the government, or question the dominant narrative, or call for regime change, you are called a "terrorist" and denied basic rights like expression and put on no-fly lists. Anti-government rhetoric is routinely suppressed, fire-walled, and forced out. Are you sure that is what you want?
This is what it feels like to live in a country which tries to uphold the rule of law. Sorry if it inconveniences you, but not sorry.
Parler has been vocal that they have no plans solving it. If they had at least showed some vague plan to resolve it, they would have earned some sympathy.
There was a gallows out the front.
In any other nation on earth, this was an attempted coup. Just because it failed doesn't mean that those involved didn't have intent.
Note well: I am far from saying that Trump is innocent. He absolutely should have known that his words would incite violence. In the most charitable light possible, he's still clueless about the effect his words would have. (I could kind of see his intent being to use the mob to pressure Congress, so that they would be inclined to see it Trump's way. He may have intended the mob surrounding the Capitol, but not the breach... in a very charitable interpretation. Even in that interpretation, though, he still very dangerously misjudged the effects of his words.)
And Trump may well be guilty of more than that. He may well be guilty of attempting a coup to remain in power, and just not have had any idea of how to do it right. (I prefer that rogues be incompetent...)
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/military-investigating-servi...
[2] https://www.wesh.com/article/2-capitol-police-officers-suspe...
There were military personnel friendly to Trump among them.
> He shouldn't have said "now go home".
I may be confused on the timeline; wasn't that after members and electoral votes had been evacuated safely so the people overtly calling to execute the Speaker and VP, or otherwise plotting to capture, injure, or intimidate members, or destroy the electoral vote certificates to provide a pretext for their Congressional allies to resort to a vote-by-states in the absence of certified votes or to count the votes with selected states excluded had already failed?
But a cynic could easily think that Trump could tell that sufficient force was arriving to stop the mob, and that cutting his losses was therefore his best option at that point, even if he were really trying to do a coup...
Clowns who beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher, planted pipe bombs, and roamed the capitol with sidearms and zip ties to take hostages.
Still sure they're just clowns?
Even the least violent among them committed a felony by entering the Capitol building. That someone else broke the window they entered doesn't make their entry any less illegal.
There's no contradiction there, despite your efforts to portray one.
People often take glee in and celebrate violence even as they commit it against others.
The german language has even given us a word for it: schadenfreude.
Thanks to the lies from the politicians and media personalities they follow, primarily the president, many of these people also fantastically believed that they were overturning a fraudulent election, and were therefore celebrating what they thought was an imminent success in that objective.
Seemed incredibly tame compared to the riots that went on over the summer that had massive amounts of looting and had buildings burnt to the ground.
There's a big difference between criticizing the government and storming the capitol.
Talk all you want. Engage in constructive debate. Run for office. Change laws through the system. All of those things are OK in the United States.
Dragging a police officer down the stairs and beating him with a flag pole is not OK in the United States.
There are clearly hosting providers (like Epik) who would be willing to take them on as clients from the start. If you read AWS's acceptable use policy, and then read the Parler's TOS, it is clear AWS was a terrible match as a hosting provider. By my read, AWS doesn't want to deal with anything that can be construed as "harmful" where Parler only forbade directly illegal behavior. (And it is apparent they barely felt a responsibility to moderate even to that level.) This was never going to work. Jan 6 brought things to a head, but as I see it, this business relationship was doomed from the start.
(I work for Amazon, these opinions are my own.)
He is full in-bed with this crowd, constantly spreading FUD about criticism of Trump, etc.
/s
When accounts build up a track record of flamewar, snark, political/ideological battle, and other things that break the site guidelines, we ban them. We have to, because otherwise this place will be engulfed by hellfire and then become scorched earth. Those things may be exciting and/or activating for a while, but they're not interesting.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site to heart, we'd be grateful. You can still express your views in that spirit, as many other HN users have been showing.
Just to be clear, it's possible to detest silicon valley monopoly power while celebrating the deplatforming of Parler in particular.
Antitrust is one concern, the risk of losing democracy to political violence during a transition of power is a separate concern.
On one hand, Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. So it's no loss that it's gone, and it took far too long to deal with it. And just like I wouldn't bat an eye for AWS taking down an ISIS recruitment site, I don't really see any loss here.
On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?
Overall it feels like a legislative failure - in an ideal world, we have laws applied even handedly to deal with this. But in the absence of political will for these laws, what should be done? I think we are better off without Parler, but how can we do that in an even handed and consistent way?
Essentially, these companies are probably just contributing to the thing they are against. But I guess so long as their hands aren't getting dirty they get to pretend like they're doing the right thing and taking the moral high ground.
I think you've missed the point. The concern OP raises is that this is no longer theoretical - these few billionaires actually can impose their worldview by controlling speech. In this case, we can all agree that Parler had to go. But the precedent / principle of the issue can be considered separately.
> They're not deciding what is acceptable speech. They're deciding what is acceptable speech for their platforms and services.
This is a distinction without a difference. If the major platforms all ban you, you are silenced. Its time we recognize the power these platforms have.
I disagree, there is an extreme difference there. Freedom of speech is specifically in regards to the government giving you the negative right of being able to say whatever you want without government prosecution (aside from some edge cases like direct threats and the like, which are closer to actual violence). What they do not do is guarantee you a platform. You are free to say whatever you like, but you are not owed the right to be listened to. Removing someone from a platform is not silencing them. A private company does not owe you anything, let alone service.
How so? Are you incapable of using non-digital media to communicate? Are you incapable of creating your own digital platforms for communication or using alternative, less popular means to do so? Are you prevented from going to city hall, council meetings, political rallies, or voting? Your speech as it relates to your rights granted in the constitution remains completely intact. Your rights are unaffected by your access to certain digital platforms.
If you don't believe free speech absolutism should be allowed, say so, but free speech and this level of corporate dominance are not compatible.
I agree, but that's a common position here.
Oh how I wish this were actually true sometimes. Try going to any zoning board meeting.
>If in a pandemic I can only legally communicate via digital tools
I see the conflict you're bringing up, it's in effect illegal to communicate in person a lot of the time due to the pandemic, so digital tools are very useful for you to be able to communicate, but if you are somehow banned from those you have few options, if any. I think the thing that is incorrect here is actually the government making it illegal to communicate via non-digital tools, even if a lot of times it is in an individual's best interest to stay inside. And once again, no one owes you a platform. You are, in your words, silenced, but I don't think that that is an issue that requires government action.
Let's consider the other extreme with a fictional corporation "MEGA INC", which suppose owns all web hosting, all ISPs. Let's also throw in that they have a monopoly over paper production and publishing. Now, do you think your argument that "this private entity can do whatever it wants" is problematic? I should hope so.
I'm not making the case that it's black/white and that this situation with Big Tech is equivalent to MEGA INC. But, it's not that our free speech rights are binary. My point is simply that we're somewhere along the spectrum spanning "private home" <-> "MEGA INC", and at this point rights are actually being diminished because of the oligopolistic nature of a significant corner where discourse happens.
So, unfortunately, I think it's a nuanced situation that's not easily reduced to a simplistic principle such as what you've stated. We have clear principles to reason about the extremes, but it's hard to make an argument in the hairy middle because both can be made to apply.
The oligopoly only concerns distribution to the widest possible audience, whether it's social media or broadcast media. And even a First Amendment constrained government is allowed to pick and choose which speech it distributes
I can see the argument that basic Internet access should be similarly regulated, especially as it uses either public frequencies (e.g. 5G) or public land (sidewalks etc) to provide the service.
First amendment rights are orthogonal.
I think this is a really important point. How I have framed this to others is: "the 6 o'clock news isn't required to give you airtime."
In the past, you could write articles to the newspaper, or contact the news and hope they picked up your story. There was not a right to be heard.
That said, I'm still not sure how I feel about what has transpired in the last week. Freedom of speech (as a principle, not in the US legal sense) has always felt like a core principle of the Internet.
We have. That's why millions of people have pushed these companies to take a stand against hate. None of these companies are doing this because they want to lose money. If they thought it would be profitable long-term, they would keep doing it. It's the invisible hand of the market that you're really upset with here.
The weird politicization of commerce is baffling to me.
I think the issue isn't really controlled speech with these platforms but more often a loss of control of the narrative. They are ill-preppared to deal with hate speech and often will act as the very propagators of it. (See FB in 2016). The real issue to be found is the massive control they have in light of their blindness to the context of their product and inability to enact real censorship of things that are truly intolerant. Personally looking from the outside in, I think that makes them a long-term risk to themselves rather than just a risk to society. It's worth noting that this will likely lead to a platform that intentionally 'free' to intolerant behavior that will compete and likely compete well as it will be additive to those looking for hate.
Yes, imagine a small town, and there's a guy known for always ranting about the coming insurrection, pedophile conspiracies, how "The Great Awakening" is near... then one day he walks into the town gun store and asks to buy a bunch of AR-15s and a ton of ammo, and the owner of the store says: "Hmm... no."
Craft store noticed their brand logo was on a poster board with messages calling for rape and execution of named individuals (a clearly illegal act). Craft store said in their sale recipt that the reserve the right to stop serving customers that promote illegal conduct.
First, however, the craft store asked the organizer to stop providing their poster boards to people organizing mass rape and execution event planning. "Please moderate, and you can continue to use our service"
The organizer days "go bleep yourself", to the store, followed by "if my members want to organize a mass execution of people, that's their protected speech!”
Store says "okay, your not welcome here anymore, see our terms of service"
AWS gave them a chance.. but at the end of the day, those messages calling for illegal acts are stored on AWS servers.. and Parler wanted to promote that kind of content to continue and amplify (it's good for business), but every day AWS is probably getting 50 warrants for information tied to having Parler as a customer. AWS service mark up doesn't cover 20 full time lawyers
If he follows that up with "Allahu Akbar," do you expect the gun store to complete the sale, or call the feds? Is that a limit on "freedom of religion"?
Or if you go to buy a ton of fertilizer, and as they're loading it into your truck, you talk about blowing up the white house -- what do you think is gonna happen?
Yet we do not treat them like regulated broadcast media, which I guess is unsurprising in that regulation lags behind technology. In the context of Parler, it seems they tried to make the best of a bad situation.
But I don't know that we should cheer this as "the right outcome", even if, in this case, it seems justified (my gut is that this was the right thing to do, in this specific case). It's time to ask broader questions around whether these companies should have that power at all, or if we need government to step in.
One can always list all the players in an industry and call that set "a monopoly and should be broken up". Or we can just take this for what it is, which is that some entity is so toxic that none of these companies (which compete with each other otherwise) want to touch it.
For a monopoly, you need anticompetitive practices. Is Facebook unfairly preventing the success of other social networks? A good example of a monopoly was 90's era Microsoft, which prevented its OEMs from shipping competing operating systems.
Terminology aside, I completely agree with you that we need far, far more choice in the marketplace.
Granted these are just lawsuits at the moment and not final verdicts but still it's not hard to see how they don't play a fair game.
(1) deplatforming could be either a democratic process, or be challengeable through some kind of democratic process.
(2) deplatforming could be at the sole discretion of platforms, but the platforms themselves need to use open standards and protocols such that it is sufficiently easy for those who were deplatformed to switch to the opposition or self-platform (for example: ios allowing competing app stores). This would be difficult and technically challenging to enact in many situations (what does it mean in the case of social networks for example?), And if there's no competition we need antitrust ASAP
If all the competition are also deplatforming you, I think at a certain point it becomes fair to say that you were more or less democratically rejected, much like if every bar in town kicks out neo-nazis that's not a failure of free speech but a success of the free market. But that relies on a large, healthy, robust competitive ecosystem which does not exist in a billionaire-dominated tech scene.
Think gay wedding cakes
> (2) ... but the platforms themselves need to use open standards and protocols
Open standards and protocols like `https` and HTML?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism
No, because you don't need AWS or Twitter or Cloudflare or any of the name tech companies to run a high-traffic web site successfully.
I wonder if this was the same sort of argument used to justify denying minorities homes / home loans? "Well they're free to build their own house!" "Well they're free to cut their own lumber!" "Well they're free to forge their own hammers!" "Well they're free to..."
This situation lies somewhere between “refusing service based on someone’s religion” and “refusing service because I just don’t like them.” Political affiliation is not yet recognized as a religious belief, so they are not a protected class. I don’t know enough about the law to say on what grounds a company stands if they drop/refuse service because they think someone is being a dick.
[1] it’s more nuanced than that of course, but I’m speaking broadly here
I do agree with you that AWS dropping them isn't evidence of a monopoly. There's plenty of competitors in that space. None of them, however, are going to touch Parler with a 10ft pole at this point.
And I’m saying they “could”. They might decide not to.
Although I don’t think anyone could have foreseen level of censorship we have now, even 5 years ago, so who knows what it will look like in 2025.
And I think if you ask the average HN reader he wouldn’t be opposed to blocking websites for political reasons.
Nowadays, the public square, the thing that the constitution is supposed to protect, which is the difference between feudalism and democracy, is de-facto (though not de-jure), owned by monopolistic corporations. They are only accountable to their shareholders, and they have nearly complete power over their platforms. The vast majority of public discourse, news and financial transactions take place on these feudal fiefdoms.
This is an oversight in the current legal framework, and will have to be corrected eventually.
Host on your own infrastructure. Present a mobile-responsive web site. Take Bitcoin.
(we're talking, politely, about free speech extremists - so none of this seems wildly inappropriate, right?)
This is all fair. If your goal is to exist on the fringe of the acceptable and legal, you're going to have to DIY.
As a bonus, I'll just add this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
My personal opinion is that this discussion about tech, politics, censorship, etc. is something that needs to happen, and maybe all parties were completely within their rights to act how they did.
There are a lot of people who don't see that as self-evident, and what they are hearing is "if you are pro-Trump, you deserve to be a social pariah." That is a real quick path to radicalization.
Society is based on a set of mutually agreed upon rules. If you convince enough people through your actions that the rules are "Heads I win, Tails you lose", then they'll decide not to play by those rules anymore. And then all hell breaks loose.
Agreed, and it follows from that that "political affiliation" protection cannot include "wants to destroy the government" -- no matter from what quadrant that sentiment flows (anarchist, socialist, fascist, whatever).
Agreeing to democracy -- and probably republicanism -- (note, both lowercase) is a bright line across which you've really decided to step outside of our mutual rules.
The trouble is that many of the same people saying these actions were perfectly acceptable also have a habit of casually stating that all people who voted for Trump are the irredeemable scum of the earth.
Try Homage to Catalonia. You'll find the author likes shooting fascists, not platforming them.
That's quite the exaggeration. You can quite literally still gather in a physical public square. Just because it's more convenient to do so online doesn't mean it's a granted right.
> The vast majority of public discourse, news and financial transactions take place on these feudal fiefdoms.
And? If a bank decides they don't want you as a customer, you can still perform cash transactions. You aren't entitled to a bank account just because the majority of people do banking.
You can? Last I checked I can't, if I do that I get arrested for breaking social distancing...
> you can still perform cash transactions.
You mean, like in Japan and Sweden, that decided to attempt to go cashless by creating more and more rules on cash so that only debit (or credit) cards are practical?
This is inaccurate at best. The gathering in D.C. last Wednesday had a legal permit for thousands of people to join.
For a while now. Sex workers, sex shops have complained about it for years. Nobody cared. I find it ironic that the same group of people advocating against consumer and worker protections now seem to demand them.
Now, suddenly, it's a great big issue because a bunch of neo-Nazis got run out of town? Not a great look, eh.
The problem is you need to rely on someone.
1) Some parts are still single points of failure, e.g. domains, dns servers
2) There are switching costs (particularly on the infra slide) both in time and money (time was the issue here).
I'm not surprised at the end result, but the effort to retain free speech was a valiant one. Forcing extremist views underground doesn't silence them, it emboldens them and makes it harder to know what they're up to. Not a good idea.
censorship is NOT the underlying problem here
Parler was moderated, and it was explicitly moderated for coherence with a right-wing/reactionary viewpoint. It was not a neutral, unfiltered platform.
This is just false. They censored all kinds of things: antifa, parody accounts, obscene usernames, porn, etc.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parle...
Doesn't libertarianism posit a weak central government, shedding all responsibilities (that can be shed) to the free market, where competition ensures the best outcomes, choices for all, etc?
If that's true, the current situation of wealthy corporations controlling various social media platforms is... the desired outcome?
The fact that competition is better in areas such as motor vehicles, due to physical standards like roads that work for everyone, lack of network effects, and so on, is beside the point. It isn't the government's fault that Orkut and MySpace didn't compete well against Facebook, or that Parler entered a service contract with another corporation that decided their TOS was violated.
This will all be sorted out in the courts, interpreting contracts which are the ultimate source of truth in the libertarian world view. Fear nothing, justice will prevail. If Parler was not in violation of the contract, they will be compensated. If they were, too bad, they failed to adhere to the contract they agreed to. They deserve to fail and the NEXT competitor to take up the mantle will have incrementally better information and chances to succeed.
OP's statement of "this is what we get" strongly implies that the current state of things is somehow the result of libertarian policies.
There is nothing libertarian about our government. That's why I bring up the extremely high spending and unjust laws we have. Blaming libertarianism for anything happening in the world requires some serious mental gymnastics.
China also has large corporations, should we blame libertarianism for all the human rights offences happening there?
If libertarianism and individualism are "a cancer" and "literal poison" then then they are the most benign and beneficial ones I've ever heard of. Of course any ideology has a spectrum of interpretations and people involved, but the core ideas of "don't hurt people and don't take their stuff" (and maybe also "leave me alone") seem pretty good to me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's pretty much been newspapers in the UK for as long as I can remember!
It’s just the last 20 years or so of everybody having a megaphone that is outside the norm.
With social media, your feed is perfectly catered to you as an individual, by using as much data on you as they can get their hands on, and a nearly endless supply of content from the "megaphones" of other users. Even if you have many of the same friends as someone, and politically align with them, you probably would find scrolling through their feed to be less interesting than scrolling through your own.
I think it's fine to be concerned about the principle while in agreement on this use. Both things can be true.
And FWIW, that's the state in which I find myself. The president used Twitter to promote lies about the election that were consumed by his followers who then used social media to plan and execute violence in the US capitol. When that same cycle threatened to repeat, these companies stepped in. Good for them, what was their other choice?
But appropriate action in this case does not mean that the process and standards used are OK in the arbitrary case and completely agree that lack of legislative standards is the problem. The tech companies had not good choices here because as a society we've not yet set any reasonable rules.
It's not really a situation of "this may be socially chilling", it's been happening, and now it's just the first time they contravened the president and made the news cycle.
I don't really see any other decision they could have made this past week. But if social media and capital in general would stop kneecapping every political option but ineffective liberalism and dogwhistle fascism, maybe the large numbers of people who are angry and feel helpless would currently have a pressure valve in a healthier direction.
Three or four massive companies with incentives to suppress the slightest disruption to profit, that hold unprecedented surveillance power, and exercise detailed control over individual and mass communication, that make apparently ideological decisions about who is allowed to exist online, are not compatible with a healthy society or any path that could lead us out of this situation.
If you have anything to do with "opposing this shit on the ground", please fucking stop. You are accomplishing less than nothing.
If you think it is good that the recent bans took place then you have no choice but to delegate decision making authority to the industry, because the government is not constitutionally permitted to demand that tech companies make those decisions.
not theoretic (not pumping my post but amusing you would comment simultaneously with my noticing this): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25749923
Personally I think we need anti-trust action against a lot of larger tech companies and second that they have now opened the door on further regulation regarding content moderation. I think getting rid of Section 230 entirely would be a mistake but I won't be surprised to see it amended in some form.
From Ars article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/amazon-cuts-off-...
Amazon said: "It's clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t "feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform." This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts."
What they could've done is consistently enforced their rules all the way along, to people of all political persuasions.
Should we have to mute ourselves because crazy people might use our words as justification for their madness? Should others censor my opinions because in their opinion, a third party might use my words for justification for their madness?
See: Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 US 444 (1969)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/brandenburg_test
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1968/492
The usage I’m seeing does not fit the below defined criteria: The speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” AND The speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
As someone who has no dog in the race, and hates violence -- is this "fake news"?? Do these rabid maga idiots actually have a point?
If these protests were organized using FB or Twitter then why aren't they also removed from the app stores?
FB profited from radicalizing people using "engagement metrics" and machine learning at a massive scale just to sell ads. Now they want to wash their hands clean?
These billionaires weren't democratically elected and they shouldn't be shaping our democracy.
As it happens, these actions are not coordinated en masse, are neither promoted nor supported by even the vast majority of people who are supposedly aligned ideologically with is perpetrators, and are not organized in spaces mostly devoted to that purpose.
I was actually in Seattle while similar protests occured, and seeing things myself, I can say that the media did mis-portray things greatly. 99% of the protestors were completely peaceful and tens of thousands of people rallied to protest day over day all peacefully. I was surprised the media coverage didn't really cover those much, it chose to focus on like the single instance of a car lit on fire at 3am and those very minor instances, sometimes the media photoshopped images too, where they'd like superimpose a person holding a weapon in front of the photo of the car on fire and things like that. And I mean all media, left-wing, right-wing, small media, big media, like they all did this, which I was very surprised about.
I felt pretty safe for the most part, when people weren't protesting I'd still go and have coffee and order croissant at my favourite places in the area that was "occupied".
Things got scary when "anti-protester" started showing up, and suddenly everyone felt like people would show up with guns so protesters felt they needed guns too, and then there was this weird tension of like why we all have guns?
I was really surprised personally at the intensity of the police response, especially in the beginning, and to me it felt like the police really escalated tensions early on which is what led to protesters starting to bring fireworks and umbrellas to protect themselves from police "croud control". Like if a single person in the croud threw a single bottle that was enough for the police to just start pepper spraying and tear gazing everyone. I always wondered why the police doesn't just go after that person that threw a bottle or broke a window, I'm not sure what justified all this collateral damage from them. There were kids and moms and even handicapped people at a lot of those protests.
Most striking is the way the police organises around protesters, even though the protests are peaceful, they flank the croud, and really position themselves like the police and protesters are about to have a Braveheart style face off. I don't understand why the police doesn't spread themselves through the croud and instead help keep the protest peaceful by deterring the few people who are there to cause raucous. They should focus on the people disrupting the protests, help protect others from them, and arrest those.
I was just really surprised by that, because if there was a parade, the police would do what I'm describing, but for a protest it seems they treat the protesters like a huge threat and that makes the whole thing really tense and makes people feel like the police is actually against them. It didn't help that the protesters were there to protest police brutality and they were welcomed by more police brutality and confrontation.
What I really want people to focus on here is this fact, I'm from Montreal, where we take Hockey seriously, and when the team Wins or Loses at the final, police cars are lit on fire, windows are smashed, while people celebrate the victory to the street or morn the loss of our hockey team!
Now in Seattle, you had 60000!! Yes I said Sixty Thousand!!! PEOPLE marching an entire day completely peacefully without a single broken window or fire: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/thousands-march-in... when the population of the whole city is 600000. That means 1 in 10 people participated in this protest, and there were not even minor raucous! That&#...
Happens in almost every city I've ever lived in. I've seen far more violence at a Los Angeles Lakers or San Francisco Giants riots after they win a championship than at my local BLM protests.
I'm pretty confused by your last sentence. It seems like a very out of order personal attack with no basis.
Now you want to know if Twitter has an active account with AWS. I could answer that. But does it matter? Nah. That's what my last sentence meant.
Again, how am I demonstrating that? I honestly can't see anyway that you have any idea what I think, from my comments in this thread, without just completely making up a projection out of whole cloth.
> Now you want to know if Twitter has an active account with AWS. I could answer that. But does it matter?
It does seem to matter, when the question is "should AWS stop hosting Twitter because of the way in which they moderate their content?". AWS can't do that if Twitter is not hosted on AWS... So I fail to see how it doesn't matter.
To answer what I think your original question was, filling in assumptions for my (still unanswered...) questions: if Twitter is hosted on AWS, and if AWS notifies them of content they are hosting with AWS that violates the AWS terms, and Twitter refuses to remove that content, then yes, I believe AWS is within their rights to suspend Twitter's account.
Here you go:
https://twitter.com/speakerpelosi/status/864522009048494080?...
And Hillary Clinton was, for years, claiming the election was “stolen” from her. “Stolen” is her word, not mine. Is she not responsible for whipping people into a frenzy over election integrity?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2019...
10 Democrat congresspeople objected to the electoral count in 2016, including Sheila Jackson-Lee challenged the electoral count in 2016. That they didn’t get a Senator to also challenge doesn’t change their own opposition to the election. Is Shiela Jackson-Lee deplatformed? Or course not. She’s a member of the congressional black caucus. She, an violence-promoting Maxine Waters get a pass from the hand-wringing of the tech and leftist “elites.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/house-democrats-trump...
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/politics/maxine-waters-trump-...
People on the left are gigantic hypocrites. And liars. Conveniently ascribing to Trump what they have been doing since before November 2016. There are hundreds of not thousands of examples of outright hypocrisy.
Another example: violence committed against Senator Rand Paul was cheered by Twitter users. Accounts weren’t purged, nor users banned en mass. The assassination attempt of Congressman Scalise — no punishment of Bernie Sanders’ campaign for inspiring hatred of Republicans that led to a self proclaimed “Bernie Bro” from firing over 50 shots in an attempt to kill Republicans.
Where is the “community standards” enforcement around people on Twitter that celebrate this actual violence against elected officials?
Hypocrites and phonies. That’s what the tech “elites” and leftist are.
During: President begins speech at approximately noon. Some protestors already amassed at Capitol. During speech, crowd begins moving away from the speech location, gather at the Capitol building, and breach outer perimeter “bike fence”.
After: The President’s speech ends at approximately 1:10pm. Crowd is still outside the Capitol doors. Congress begins certifying the vote. Protestors clash with police, both sides spraying chemical irritants.
Protesters continue to gather in numbers, surrounding the Capitol building until breaching the exterior doors at approximately 2:10pm.
Other than the planting of pipe bombs at the Capitol/RNC/DNC (which I haven’t seen reporting on the timing), all significant violence took place shortly after the President’s speech ended.
The Unites States is not in that list. Hence it is more vulnerable to problems associated with allowing hate speech (i.e. incitement of violence by foreign-state actors, etc.).
Companies that operate on the global markets tend to operate with the standards that are acceptable globally. In particular: "On 31 May 2016, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, jointly agreed to a European Union code of conduct obligating them to review "[the] majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech" posted on their services within 24 hours."
So in that particular case, influence of these companies might be bringing United States closer to best practices adopted in the majority of developed democracies.
Best practices for maintaining a democracy or best practices for maintaining social order? There's a difference. You might argue that restricting hate speech is actually a step away from democracy towards more government control.
And consider how moderation of hate speech affects these parameters. Evaluating these on an example of presidential debates of 2020 might be a good option. As there is a contrast between the first debate, that included no moderation and a second debate, that included some.
It's harder to refute lies in the marketplace of ideas if everyone with a megaphone is obligated to echo them. Perhaps this wouldn't be true if people were perfectly rational, but if people were perfectly rational they wouldn't be believing and spreading lies in the first place.
>Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage which emphasizes the difficulty of debunking bullshit: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
It's one thing if I say the election was stolen. I should not be censored for saying that it was. My voice alone will not sway anything. The problem is that so much power is concentrated with the president that it ONLY takes his voice to throw an entire country into chaos. That's too much power with one person.
So what am I saying? That I should have freedoms the president should not?
Well, the USA could impeach and remove that person, or they could reduce the power of his office. But so far the people and their elected representatives have opted not to do either of those things.
"do nothing", just like they did nothing when riots were breaking out in BLM protests.
I think this question conflates "private company exercises right to refuse service" and "private company decides what's acceptable speech". The internet is not truly centralized and no tech giant has a monopoly on speech. There remains plenty of internet real estate to host ideas on that's not owned by tech giants. I think it should remain the right of these companies not to do business with organizations they choose not to and that said organization should also have the right to find another provider who will do business with them (or create their own if need be).
Is this not basically the same as porn hosting? There are hosts who don't want to be associated with it, and there are hosts who have no qualms taking porn money.
For AWS, I agree there are many alternatives, and in fact what shocked me wasn’t so much that they terminated their contract with Parler, but the fact that they seem to have done so with zero notice period. Which I find extremely cavalier.
We have strong bill of rights restrictions on governmental power because of the massive amount of power held by the government. So having that power be controlled by small numbers of entirely unaccountable figures with more power than the government in certain areas doesn't seem better at all?
Eventually the federal government came in and decided race was a protected class.
Obviously the problem isn't as simple as saying Google or anyone else must allow certain groups to use their platforms. Because that compels speech. Which the government also can't do.
Proper legal experts would have to craft it but I think the limit should be somewhere around access and use of the infrastructure. Domain registrars and hosts cannot discriminate. However If Twitter doesn't want someone on their platform I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to kick them. We just cant allow for those paltform hosts to collude with the infrastructure providers to deplatform others completely.
And I can think of two reasons why from a legal standpoint. 1: most of the internet infrastructure in the US was built with public dollars. Even if its nominally owned by a private ISP, they were paid by the government to build it. Historically the courts have used government funds as a way to enforce legal limits.
2: coordinated deplatforming like what happened with Parlor looks an awful lot like it was an intentional hit to take out a potential competitor to the current online status quo. That should worry everyone really.
This is a question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that Parler had more “hate” than Twitter, etc.?
Are these legitimate calls to violence? Or just jokey memes? Is there a difference? Who decides that? In what sense do these posts not demonstrate support for political violence?
You might say all these platforms previously gave Parler the benefit of the doubt and then were faced with incontrovertible evidence that Parler was facilitating political violence.
The problem isn't just that they had more, though logic would suggest they did; after all, their user base are refugees from other platforms that pushed them out for extremist language, advocating for violence, conspiracy theories, etc.
It's that Parler refused to remove it.
So even if the rate of introduction of this content was the same on Parler (which I don't buy for a second, see argument above), the total concentration and visibility of it is higher because it's not taken down.
"Everyone said Pence sold out!!! Time to enter the capitol. Go patriots. Echo and enter the building dont let them vote. Put pressure. We are riding in!!! Echo big"
66 comments, 301 echoes (i.e. retweets), 375 upvotes (i.e. likes)
There's a torrent of Parler posts that is being analyzed, so there may be better conclusions published soon: https://parler-archive.deadops.de/parler_2020-01-06_posts-pa...
That said, I still don't support taking down a site because there's no moderation. These people won't go away; I wonder if decentralized/p2p technologies will see more adoption by the radical right for this reason.
It seems as though there is in inverse relationship between ease of use and centralization (obviously). As communication becomes decentralized, the ability to accrue a large audience becomes more difficult. This supports the rise of ideas that can gain widespread support on their merit, as opposed to gaining widespread support via having a mass audience to start with.
To illustrate: on one side, we have a centralized extreme: Twitter (or Reddit, or Facebook). On the other side we have a decentralized extreme: spoken word. Which is easier to radicalize a country with?
If extremists move to decentralized or p2p alternatives to social media, they will shrink in the long run, letting the fringe ideas remain on the fringe.
If all social media went the way of decentralization, we would see far less extremism in general, simply because most people wouldn't go looking for it and it's pretty hard to spread extremist ideas in a one-on-one conversation.
What I'm getting at is, I understand Parler is generally a right-leaning platform, and therefore the types of "hate" will be right-leaning. Twitter is a generally left-leaning platform, so I would expect their type of hate to be generally left-leaning. So I think a tweet about storming the capitol isn't good evidence that Twitter is better. Because, for exmaple, perhaps a violent Antifa tweet would be left alone on Twitter but moderated in Parler. Perhaps some ML bot can quantity sentiment of tweets.
"On September 17, 2020 we will lay siege to The @WhiteHouse for exactly fifty days.
We need your wisdom and expertise to pull off a radically democratic toneshift in our politics.
Are you ready for #revolution?
This is the #WhiteHouseSiege"
https://twitter.com/adbusters/status/1288193793267625984
Just because radical things are posted on your website doesn't mean all the discourse on the site is bad and your site should be deplatformed. We already apply that standard to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others.
As a side note, I've heard that the people who actually stormed the Capitol Building (not just holding signs outside of it, which is perfectly fine) used Facebook to coordinate and not Parler.
A policy that was FAR more relaxed than any of their competitors, which was by design and part of their marketing pitch: come here to say those things you're not allowed to say elsewhere.
Parler's position is: unless the language is strictly illegal according to the letter of the law that's designed limit government censorship of speech, then it's allowed.
By that definition, if I call for someone's death, unless I have the means and the opportunity and mention a specific time, then it doesn't count and the post stays up.
Clearly Amazon, Google, and Apple have policies that are more strict than US law. And that makes sense: US law is shaped by the constitution, which is meant to restrict the government's ability to limit speech. And we should absolutely want the rules regarding government censorship to be as narrow as possible.
But private services are free to operate by different rules.
For example, if I walk into a McDonalds and start swearing at all the customers, I'll get kicked out even if I'm not breaking the letter of the law.
So, did they have a moderation policy? Yes, technically. But did that policy allow extremist and violent language to persist on their site at a level above and beyond what's seen on any competing platform outside of, say, 8chan? Absolutely.
> As a side note, I've heard that the people who actually stormed the Capitol Building (not just holding signs outside of it, which is perfectly fine) used Facebook to coordinate and not Parler.
And Facebook would pull that content down if they found it.
Parler won't.
That's what got them pulled from AWS, and the Google and Apple app stores.
But that's just it, isn't it? Parler tried to make a new service that plays by a new set of rules. And they were crushed, because it turns out that you actually can't have your own rules unless you are already at the scale of Apple, AWS, etc.
That's not an infringement on my rights, that's the free market at work
Before this, the power was somewhat theoretical and used in tiny marginal cases. Now, it's proven that they can effectively exercise the power in a major way, and that's news.
Honestly, it's really not. We've seen groups like ISIS kicked off social media, for example, and no one blinked an eye. Heck, Milo Yiannopoulos was deplatformed way back in 2016.
The thing that's news is that a significant percentage of a major US political party is now associated with a form of right wing extremism and wrapped up in a major conspiracy theory movement whose adherents are willing to commit violence in an attempt to subvert an election.
That's not at all true. If I recall the same thing happened to 8chan/8kun. Yet somehow they live on. If Parler has a market, they'll find a way.
That said, it sucks but, well, that's capitalism for ya.
What else would you suggest? Regulating these various companies such that the government gets to decide who can use their services?
Because if so, a) that would require new laws, b) it'd probably fall afoul of the first amendment, and c) it doesn't seem to align well with free market conservative ideology, and so should be opposed by the very users of Parler that are being affected by this.
Facebook ultimately started removing Holocaust denial content because it violated their harassment policy, not because it was illegal.
I think it's a non-sequitur.
But man, wow. I joined Parler several months ago and that's literally all my default feed was -- various flavors of right wing rage. Not all was violent or racist. Some were verified celebrities and right wing politicians; those tended to be rather mild.
But typing various slurs or words like "shoot" or "hang" into the search box returned some eye-watering results.
The difference between it and Twitter was not subtle.
I think it's very interesting that you lead off citing good faith in a situation where, in my experience, you're about to demonstrate literal bad faith. It's like you wish to take off the table the interpretation that you are intentionally lying for the sake of argument.
Let me fix that:
> that multiple countries and international organizations categorize as hate speech?
A casual reminder that when most think these open air rules are intended to stifle conversation it is generally for very clear legal and moral reasons. If you believe this is used by them to control people then you should also believe that a replacement should view this speech as antithetical to the existence of the free speech social company.
It's one thing to ban talk about the platform you are talking on.
It's not the same thing to ban intolerant behavior.
It all leads back to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
He goes on to explain what situation would call for use of suppression, for example, the use of violence or rejecting reason or logic by the intolerant (Which, obviously both are what happened in January 6th and in this narrative) ;)
The ban isn't on conservative viewpoints, it is on intolerant speech that has no want to make a logical discussion and resorts to violence. Trust me, I'm using it correctly.
Unwillingness to accept(or tolerate) views, beliefs, or behavior that differ from one's own.
When we talk about intolerant behavior we are talking about actions and statements that are intended to demean others by design (and praise the inverse), this is pretty easy to define. Saying that a person's skin color or gender makes them lesser or to be despised is clearly intolerant, the person in context is clearly unable to change this as it is how they are. Whats funny about this is that the US Bill of rights is a statement on intolerance by design. It's meant to both give rights but also set tone.
Maybe something is lost over text, but I genuinely prefaced my question because I know it's a delicate political topic for people. But your response is just childish. I literally barely know anything about Parler. Also, how is asking for evidence so triggering? That should be the cornerstone of any these types of discussions.
But to answer your question: No, I can't prove to you what I'm thinking. Nobody ever can. So perhaps you should just take my question on face value and stop assuming malicious intent.
I think the parent raises a very legitimate question of what defines a "hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism." I've never had a Twitter account myself, but some of the publicly-available content I've seen there there certainly fits that description. Conversely, I did briefly have a Parler account, and what I saw in my particular bubble did not fit that description at all - It was crypto enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and comedians. I'm not trying to imply that my anecdote is data or that Parler is some bastion of positivity, but the way your premise is stated only requires a single counterexample: some "hate speech" exists on Twitter, and not everything on Parler is.
You say, "the purpose of Parler's existence is (was) to facilitate communication that larger social networks stifle." To me that sounds like the old adage that "the Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it." At least five years ago that was largely seen as a feature rather than a bug. But recently the tide of popular opinion seems to have shifted in general favor of censorship. Undeniably there are some bad ideas out there, but I worry that the "cure" of censorship is a slippery slope that could very quickly become worse than the disease.
I really dodged a bullet. Thank God for our tech overlords and their new Ministry of Truth. I can now sleep easy knowing that they are busy scouring the rest of the internet and it's marketplace of ideas for more doubleplusbadthink from which to shield me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is... is a concrete example of speech that would be banned from Twitter and Facebook. I think it's telling that there are 25k up votes.
What I'm getting at is, I understand Parler is generally a right-leaning platform, and therefore the types of "hate" will be right-leaning. Twitter is a generally left-leaning platform, so I would expect their type of hate to be generally left-leaning. So I think a tweet about e.g. storming the Capitol being banned on Twitter but not Parler isn't good evidence that Twitter is better. Because, for example, perhaps a violent Antifa tweet would be left alone on Twitter but censored on Parler. Perhaps some ML bot can quantity sentiment of tweets. That's the kind of evidence I would like to see.
If I start a new social media service, what are the objective measures I can use to ensure I'm moderating well and quickly enough? How should we allow this to interact with scale?
If a new startup goes from 10 to 10,000 users overnight, and 0.5% of users post offensive comments that first day, how long does that startup have to remove them all before they are designated as "bad"?
Also, how should we view overmoderation within this context? I think most people would find it injust and orwellian to ban a black sociology professor for posting an academic analysis of the use of the n-word through history, but I fear society is going to overcorrect.
Nobody would bat an eye if you were banned from HN or reddit for hate speech. Why should a platform be any different? If my customer started using my services to spread Nazism, I'd ban them too. Let's say I was a baker - would it be reasonable that I be compelled to draw swastikas on cakes? Obviously, that's absurd! It is equally absurd to demand that other businesses provide platforms for behavior they don't condone.
Freedom of speech is freedom from oppression by government. Parler isn't being oppressed, they just aren't being given a platform to oppress others by private citizens and corporations. Well, not anymore, although lots of corps made some money from them while they could.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see GOP resurgence in 2022, along with another very real attack on section 230.
Twitter et al booting persons from their services is the neighbour slamming their door in your face, or the baker refusing to do business with you.
The town square is tcp/ip, not the services on top of it.
Twitter is more like a mall owned by a large corporation and while there is some trouble there, they will kick people off the property that are too offensive. If you try to start an insurrection at a mall, you will be kicked out and banned.
It is in Twitters and mall owners best interest to start insurrections on their properties because there will be ramifications for allowing that to happen, that is not good for business.
This justification doesn't work if elsewhere is shut down too.
This book may have been pivotal to British utilitarianists, but it didn't have much, if any, impact on the U.S.
Before then, "free speech" as a concept did not exist. (The closest was the freedom of religious practice, which is not the same thing.)
Now that is a heavy claim to be making. Do you have anything to back it up?
Before the U.S., nobody even thought free speech was possible. England was the closest, but their version of free speech was still subject to government censorship.
It was the writings of the Founding Fathers, and the Bill of Rights in particular, that established the doctrine that is today known as "freedom of speech."
"The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, in the cases determined by the law."
Specifically, how does banning people for their actions work well as an analogy for banning someone for who they are (and you must take that for granted, because that's the legal frameworks opinions on the matter)?
That's also an even worse example because the supreme court found in favor of the cake shop.
I think this analogy needs a lot of work.
While there are significant improvements that could be made to our laws, the most significant failure here is one of enforcement. When Republican senators chose not to hear witnesses during the impeachment trial they took a significant step towards making Donald Trump a despot and legitimizing the alt-right. The recent strife is a direct consequence.
You can argue that the violent events of last week would have simply taken place early last year, but at least it might not have threatened peaceful transfer of power after the elections.
That has always been the history of media, see Hearst, Murdoch, Mercer, etc. The democracy of the early Internet was the exception from billionaires being in charge, not the norm.
Hearst used to be the voice of print media for decades.
The situation in radio is the same as it is on the internet: a few publicly-owned companies own a supermajority of the FM airwaves. If you wonder why you can change the station and hear the same song simultaneously on 5 different stations, it's because they're all owned by the same company.
In TV, for most of the past 2 decades, conservative billionaires have owned more than 75% of the public TV stations in the U.S. and Australia, and have been using that bully pulpit on behalf of conservatives during that time. Murdoch especially was instrumental in providing Trump (and other extremist candidates like Cruz) thousands of hours of free coverage during the 2016 campaign. The ownership groups would regularly interfere with local media and demand they either air or avoid topics as directed by ownership. Where was conservative outrage over billionaires deciding speech during this time?
As a media company that 'creates' tweets to be displayed on CNN, etc., or read by logged out users, the analogy to traditional media is more straightforward.
Just listen to the Parler executives account of what happened. Contrary to all the nonsense being spewed by ideologues, Parler did have a moderation policy that prohibited incitement to violence, and they did enforce it, but it was neither perfect nor instantaneous (since, by deliberate choice, only humans were involved). They also complied to the requests from the three tech titans, but of course that did not matter, their fate was sealed before the first letter was sent.
This is a moment of astonishing hypocrisy and terrible abuse of power. Silicon Valley has proven to half of America that the system is rigged beyond recourse, and for a number of those Americans that might be the straw that breaks the camels back, leading them into radicalization and terrorism. It would be very wise for all of us in tech, in any position of influence, to urge calm and dialogue and to provide space for all speech that is not urging violence. We are not children to throw away our country because of a single deranged fool. We need to show to the country that tech is not an instrument available to only those of a certain ideological bent and that we can talk and sort out our differences without violence or repression.
These moderators were overwhelmingly MAGA/Trump supporters, so I'm sure you can guess what kind of posts they expected to see before they unblocked a new user.
This was all shared/revealed on Twitter, so take it as "evidence" with whatever grain of salt you like, but people didn't just make up these claims about what Parler was..
So while perhaps Parler claimed to be a place for open debate and unrestricted ideas, it is seems that was just a thin cover for their much more focused goal of being a home for all this extremist right-wing talk in America.
https://twitter.com/donk_enby/
She links to a bunch of other articles and sources as well, including lists of moderators etc...
I guess shutting down mosques that promoted terrorism led to more terrorism?
And in any case, it seems pretty straightforward to forbid platforms from banning PEOPLE, it should only be possible to ban utterances. At the very least, Trump should have a legal right to be unbanned as long as he doesn’t post things that Twitter doesn’t allow.
By that point, what would having your own tech stack do? How do you even collect revenue when banks and payment providers cancel on you? This is the power of freedom of association at work, the power behind cancellation.
Even for people who don't agree with his libertarian politics, there's no arguing that he is anything short of an uncommonly decent man. He's certainly the closest I've ever seen anyone come to being the mythical "honest politician." So of course they're attacking him...
I have a hunch that any "extremely racist" comments may have been more to the effect that although slavery was very bad indeed, there might have been better ways to dismantle it than by half the country fighting the other half [0], which is a sentiment worth considering in the context of current events.
[0] https://www.lewrockwell.com/2007/12/bob-murphy/ron-paul-and-...
My feeling is that most people would not like to belong to a space where open racism and other abhorrent views are tolerated and encouraged.
Those that do can have their fringe spaces, but they shouldn't expect mainstream companies to help them do so.
I never thought I would say this, but I have become a fan of Europe's approach to regulation. They've pushed for GDPR which at least gets us the ability to obtain and delete our data, they've acknowledged the right to repair, and as self-serving as it may be, they understand the ramifications of a unilateral takedown of the communications of a head of state – particularly the precedent it sets. They will likely continue their fight until they've setup their own alternatives to SV-based infrastructure.
Citation needed. Neither I nor my friends or acquaintances used it for any of these things. Hell, I've hired people off of Parler.
I find it ironic that the ban is what makes people think the techCos are controlling society rather than the fact that all actions of social networks and hosting services impact society. Like the time when FB make some news feeds more negative to track impact and engagement. Or how the radicalization of users on FB can happen due to the Algo.
Ultimately this is a legislative failure, but it also is how a free market should defend itself of dangerous content as well. (keep in mind a Civil war 2 isn't exactly great for the economy).
What is wild is that the laws for this all exist and are in use. The behavior here is the use of Section 230 as designed. The definition of insurrection and hate speech are all defined. Clearly what has happened is actually late action by social platforms rather than overreach as the US Gov lacks any mode to actually take on this content.
We have laws protecting people from discrimination based on race, sexuality, etc. A grocery store can't refuse to serve people by race. Maybe we should expand these protected classes and make sure they apply to Internet businesses as well. I don't think we will (or should) expand them in such a way that Parler would be included, though.
And so is Facebook. And Twitter. And YouTube.
And so what? If you don’t like that stuff, you are free to not use services that you don’t like.
Yes? I mean, look where you're posting. HN is very heavily moderated. Check out dang's post history for all the work he has to do. HN has very clear ideas on what speech is "acceptable" and what is not, and they are significantly more complicated than the "don't incite political violence" standard being enforced against Parler.
I mean, really. Parler failed to clear even the simplest, most straightforward, most consensus- and norm-driven ideals of how public discourse is supposed to work. And they didn't really get "moderated" any harder than any of us would have.
Yet we still have to rally behind them as the standard-bearer for megacorp censorship? Really? Can't we wait for at least a tiny bit of evidence that they're misusing their power first?
Comments that are unacceptable on Parler: Pretending to be a cow owned by Devin Nunes
https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is...
IMO it's reasonable to consider it a hate site or a site which embraces racist behavior.
But this isn't about criminalising speech promoting conspiracy theories, radicalisation, and racism. It's about private entities withdrawing the infrastructure of speech, which obviously gets a lot more complicated to reason about and legislate.
I'm mostly okay with Apple and Google removing the app from their stores. I'm slightly less okay with Amazon withdrawing their services. But if Parler ends up reborn on a server running out of someones house or business I would be very much against their utility providers cutting off access.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm with you and don't quite know what to think about this either.
However I do worry that if we're not careful as a society someone posting on HN (or maybe a government approved Facebook group) will eventually say:
>The internet was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. So it's no loss that it's gone, and it took far too long to deal with it.
Are you supposed to rebuild the entire tech ecosystem that the entire world runs on? Fight through every damn moat along the way? Is this the bar we set here?
Its easy to talk free speech for popular speech. It's how people react to unpopular speech that shows their true colours.
It doesn't mean private individuals have to humor you. It doesn't even mean they have to listen to you.
The 3 biggest technology companies in the world united in the last two days to shut down an upstart competitor who was, at the time, literally the #1 app on iPhone and Android.
So the issue is primarily one of anti-trust laws. Monopolies do not get to arbitrarily and selectively enforce their ToS against competitors; that is an illegal abuse of market power.
The tech giants this week seem to have demonstrated that they do in fact hold monopoly power in the market, and are willing to use it to crush a potential competitor. This seems to me to be an unprecedented situation, a likely anti-trust violation, and potentially to the extent that it was a coordinated action by these companies, a violation of RICO statutes.
I think it is fair to say that Parler, like every social network, could be used to post hateful messages, or messages advocating violence. GP stated that Parler was a “hate site” but I think it’s more accurate to say that Parler was a site that carried some hateful messages. It was by no means a site formed or designed specifically to carry hate.
A corollary that I would raise is a similar standard in copyright infringement. Sites which are designed specifically with the intent of committing copyright infringement are now criminally liable — it has recently become a serious felony to make these kinds of sites. However, site that show a significant non-infringement purpose are not illegal, even if some infringement takes place on their platform. You might recall that YouTube was a site that got its start with rampant copyright infringement, and to this day has a significant amount of infringing material on its servers, but it is not criminally liable, or even civilly liable for that content due to the fact that the site has a significant non-infringement purpose. I think that’s a fair analogy with Parler.
If there’s a copyright or public safety issue with a piece of content posted on a social media platform, the law should provide for a takedown procedure against the content, not against the whole platform. The cause of action should be against the poster, not against the entire platform. Nuking the entire platform from orbit is not an appropriate remedy, and in any case should be done through a court of law, not through the actions of a monopolistic cartel.
Maybe Facebook, but...
How did Parler compete with Apple? What market were they competing in?
How did Parler compete with AWS? Did they share the same sort of clients?
How did Parler compete with Google?
Remember Parler was asked by the tech co's to moderate such content, and it refused.
I also don't see how Parler competed with AWS.
For many kinds of criminal content posing an acute public safety hazard, it does, and it's very simple: if you have knowledge of the existence of the material, you must take it down or become yourself criminally liable for it, in addition to anyone who is already criminally liable. (For copyright, there's the DMCA takedown process, which is more generous because people don't tend to get killed as a forseeable consequence of civil copyright violations.)
Of course, if you are a second level host and don't have item-by-item control (such as AWS for a site hosted there by another firm), the only efficient way to acheived that may be to drop the entire account.
I'd be quite surprised if this is true in the USA. If you could provide an example of such a case I'd be very interested. The only time I'm aware of the Supreme Court ruling on online hate speech was to overturn the conviction of a Anthony Elois, who posted some truly disgusting things online. [1]
I'm not aware of any case where an internet platform was held crminally liable for content posted on their platform, in fact Section 230 provides "wide immunity" for both criminal and civil liability for the content that users post. [2]
For example, from [2];
> A recent case [3] out of the 2nd Circuit illustrates the types of issues courts are facing in our era of social media predominance and terrorist attacks.
> The 2nd Circuit case arose after Hamas posted content on Facebook that both directly and indirectly led to the attack and death of several Israeli nationals, including a 10 year-old girl. The victims subsequently sued Facebook for allowing the posts to exist, and to “match” terrorist sympathizers with terrorist organizations.
> While the content at issue violated Facebook’s terms of service and Community Standards, Facebook did not remove the content prior to the attacks.
[1] - https://gizmodo.com/supreme-court-online-threats-legal-as-lo...
[2] - https://blogs.findlaw.com/second_circuit/2019/08/what-legal-...
[3] - https://caselaw.findlaw.com/summary/opinion/us-2nd-circuit/2...
> I'd be quite surprised if this is true in the USA. If you could provide an example of such a case I'd be very interested. The only time I'm aware of the Supreme Court ruling on online hate speech
This isn't about hate speech, which is protected speech. It's about a subset of content which is itself criminal (that is, for which the source would be criminally liable), where a service provider knows of the content and the facts which make it criminal (whether or not they understand the criminal prohibition itself)
And it's not about civil liability (things some private party can sue you for damages, and where therefore the Section 230 protection is likely to apply) but criminal liability, that is, things where the government can take action leading to criminal fines and/or imprisonment.
Examples of laws creating this kind of knowledge-based obligation are 18 USC Sec 2339A regarding material sorry to terrorists and 18 USC Sec 1466A with regard to obscene visual representation of the sexual abuse of children.
> ...it is necessary that a defendant in some sort associate himself with the venture, that he participate in it as in something that he wishes to bring about, [and] that he seek by his action to make it succeed.”
The example of Sec 1466a is an excellent one. Facebook is the world’s largest platform for sharing exactly those types images, and they have not been charged under 1466a, because they are not liable under it.
What would be pertinent is 18 USC 2258A [2] which requires service providers to report any such content that that are made aware of to the tip line, but by now we are far afield of the topic at hand.
A simple introduction on hosting and platform liability, for example [1].
[1] - https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt...
[2] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A
Coordinated? Competitor? Where do you find evidence of coordination? Why do you think parler is a competitor?
> it’s more accurate to say that Parler was a site that carried some hateful messages
Not accurate at all. Why do you think people used parler instead of twitter.
> Nuking the entire platform from orbit is not an appropriate remedy
When the entire platform resists and refuses to moderate, nuking from orbit is a fine remedy. Parler was too stupid to build alternatives into their risk profile. I think they believed their own hype.
But I also think the rights of the services providers have to considered as well. Should Nintendo be forced to publish porn apps in their Switch online store for example? Should HN be prevented from moderating comments here? Should thedonald.win be prevented from deleting anti-Trump comments? No is my answer to those rhetorical questions.
At the same time I don't think that electricity, water, and internet service providers should be allowed to cut off Westboro Baptist Church either. Likewise for their domain name provider.
I think things like AWS and payment services are more like electric and water suppliers then they are like app stores and web forums. So I suppose that I'm in favour of drawing a line in a reasonable place, it's just not clear to me yet exactly where that line should be.
What would help is what we should have done a long time ago: Apple should either allow users to install different app stores or submit to regulation as a platform.
That approach, combined with filter bubbles and AI recommendations driving engagement/addiction, gave us rise of things like Antivax movement, Trump, QAnon and now an attempted coup in the US.
We should probably think hard before we consider it the only possible approach.
At the same time, saying "some speech actually isn't ok" doesn't mean that unaccountable monopolies of corporate overlords that wield more power than some nation states are ok. Both things can be true at the same time.
It’s a lack of confidence and trust in our governments and corporations. The fact that those same governments and corporations own our media makes it even worse.
I think criminalising unpopular speech will make the symptoms of this problem worse rather than better.
Is sharing someone else's private information, publishing outright lies about safety of vaccines, or claiming some ethnicities or nationalities are subhuman and should be murdered right now "unpopular speech"?
I mean, I sure as hell hope it is unpopular!
But it is much more than just "unpopular speech". Framing it like "criminalizing unpopular speech" makes it sound like someone wants to criminalize saying "I think the Twilight series were genuinely good movies." but we're talking about people saying "All those <insert slur> should be killed."
And yet, you are right that in some cases this happens - for example when some US states decided to solve problem of people complaining about animal cruelty by making filming on farms illegal. That's a complete bullshit and it is harmful to the society.
But people who incite violence and Antivaxxers who actively hurt people by spreading diseases? I don't think so.
I use the term unpopular speech as a binary divider of speech between popular speech and unpopular speech. Popular speech doesn’t require protection by definition so the implication is that free speech laws exist to protect unpopular speech. I wasn’t suggesting that “I like Twilight” is equivalent to “<slurs> should be killed.”
Yes I would describe lies about vaccines, claiming that some groups of humans are subhuman, and doxing as both harmful and as examples of unpopular speech. Also they are unpopular because they are harmful rather than because they are untrue (doxing people is harmful directly because the information is correct).
All those things, despite being harmful, are legal. It seems that you are suggesting that we should consider banning some forms of unpopular speech because it is harmful. By banning it I assume you mean to make it illegal. If you mean something else please let me know!
Not vaccines though, but that might come to pass as well, since vaccine safety misinformation is basically manipulation that runs vulnerable people into biological weapons and that's pretty bad.
And life is ... fine. We go on without having the (pretty much uniquely USian) 100 % unlimited free speech.
Comparing different places is always difficult - Germany is understandably much harsher at limiting Nazis than US is - but saying there's less school shooters and domestic terrorists because of it probably doesn't see the whole truth like mental healthcare, quality of education and access to weapons etc.
So I'm not sure what to make of it.
* In general, tech companies should be less powerful and monopolistic.
* In this specific case, the tech companies used the power they have in a way that is overall beneficial to society.
Trump incited a violent insurrection on the US Capitol. If Senators and Representatives had not successfully escaped through tunnels before the rioters got to them, some of them would be dead. The fact that Trump is still in office after that shows that the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch to check Trump's executive power.
In the absence of that, we need some entity powerful enough to push back against rising fascism and authoritarianism. I don't like that that power apparently has to be a handful of tech giant companies, but I'll take that (temporarily at least) over the US becoming a right-wing dictatorship.
> the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch
I'm more concerned by this than anything else. In effect this results in calcified government, which can neither regulate tech companies (or anything) effectively, or serve as a check on executive power. People need to start moving to Wyoming and Alaska, yeah the weather sucks.....but we need to redefine 'civic duty'.
The overwhelming vast majority of the people on Parler were simply normal people tired of what they perceived as a double standard in Twitter's treatment of conservatives as opposed to liberals, and wished to support a competitor.
Perhaps we need a better, faster judicial mechanism for taking down "major content". I'm not saying the government is a great solution for this problem, but IMHO it beats the status quo until we can find a better system.
Not your right to be provided an audience
The right to a platform has never been guaranteed. The only difference is that with social media, your message is broadcast first and moderated after.
FB's "platform" feature is largely listener-driven. You can still use FB and not listen to persons X, Y and Z. It's all posted by users, and users decide what to follow or read (except paid content). Not like TV Stations and Newspapers. That's what Social Media companies have been telling us for a while!
But if we want apply usual standards of platform rights and responsibilities to FB, we should then require it to also be responsible for what's posted there.
You can't have it both ways.
I'm more troubled by the total cessation of infrastructure as the mitigation of choice, rather than a temporary pause of services. During the pause, work with law enforcement to identify those specific posts that satisfy the Brandenberg "imminent" criteria, mark those as redacted, then return to service. Leaving open possible further work with law enforcement to share a feed and tie in redaction by future judicial decisions. I'm hoping I missed where it says that Parler was offered this choice and turned it down.
I'm even more troubled by the continued "let them eat cake" dismissive ennui of the chattering classes to the natural-world plights of the most radicalized members of the Trump supporters (and for that matter, to BLM supporters' plights treatment by other chattering classes), as they're pretty much at the "nothing left to lose" stage. Having been not simply ignored since the 70's onwards, but jeered at, derided, and mocked, instead of rehabilitating their life situations, has driven them into the arms of malign ideologies that openly lie to them fealty will improve their lot in life, when no other ideology will have them.
Just like in my enterprise work with my clients, when I hear extreme dissatisfaction, that's an opportunity for me to listen, empathize, then work together iteratively to solve problems. Instead, the US treats such expressions as opportunities to suppress. That only guarantees the pressure builds up elsewhere you cannot predict (in enterprise work, it often manifests as political chits being called in, and budget found where none was found before to completely pivot away and build the users' own solution, however imperfect it may be).
The US treats many of its have-nots (all along the political spectrum and not just along one vector) like it treats its prisoners. Brutalize with platitude-laden inaction instead of rehabilitate. It's no wonder the nation manufactures a dictatorship-loving consent.
All of the Trump supporters I know are upper middle class suburbanites who have been fairly well off for quite a while. Not sure I have any empathy for the contempt at all. I just don't buy this sob story what-so-ever.
I feel even less bad for violent extremists that have zero goals or demands except to destabilize everything because they believe whatever they see on the internet. There is no ideology for them to defend; only their right to hate. They only want the ability to have whatever they believe to be true to be the case even when it is not the case.
Ironically, if the people who were truly destitute and down-trodden could find some way to ignore the superficial partisanship that they've been sold and unite under social and economic policy we might have an actual movement on our hands. Unfortunately they've all been convinced that their superficial differences aren't superficial at all and that the other side is wrong; now it appears at any cost.
The financial bifurcation in the US and to a lesser extent in many other parts of the developed world is quite big, and I don't know how big it has to get before a competent demagogue gets traction in the US. The extremes in both the GOP and the DNC have just been handed a dangerous working template with Trump's history lesson. They just learned that extremism works, and it scales from local to national politics. It was not always so; one of the salient features of American politics in the past was just how consistently difficult it was to move the center any appreciable distance politically, the infamous "lumpentariat".
I believe this is because the US valuation landscape is fundamentally broken. This goes way beyond the economic or financial system. How we account for value over time is structured in very perverse incentive structures leading to the power law popping up in an all-over fashion when in the past it didn't use to dominate the landscape so much (it had localized instantiations but these were more local maxima than a general law more widely applicable). It's generating a "desperation deciles" that the means and averages of metrics sweep under statistical rugs.
I think these deciles are mattering now due to the law of large numbers. With "only" a 100M population base, such deciles are manageable, whether through coercion (unfavorable), assistance (nominal approach), or generationally long-term rehabilitative policy like public education (ideal). But I suspect there is something about near-billion- and billion-scale population governance our governing systems are not scaling to meet.
Also, a consistent theme I see in these kinds of discussions is similar to your "...if the people who were truly destitute and down-trodden could find some way to ignore the superficial partisanship that they've been sold and unite under social and economic policy...". In my humble and limited experience, the ones in the developed world are short-term focused on survival, putting food on the table and a roof over their heads, then with what limited discretionary time and cognitive energy left over, trying to find some happiness in a pretty bleak outlook as globalism systemically blocks their avenues of escape.
There are some limited avenues left, but the arithmetic doesn't support lifting enough of the desperation deciles out of poverty or functional poverty to matter through transitioning them to plumbers, welders, fitters, rig work, etc. While there are currently screaming needs for many of those skills, it isn't in the tens of millions scale we're needing (law of large numbers).
Poor people don't riot if their poverty is perceptibly, contiguously improving over time. Rich people don't incite malign ideologies if there aren't poor people who will act as foot soldiers absorbing the brunt of adverse consequences of swearing fealty to such beliefs. When there is a chicken in every pot, people will riot over sports teams, but not politics. Actual getting-policies-and-legislation-established-and-practiced politics is dead-ass boring to the vast majority, so getting this many people to even pay attention to just the cartoonish depictions of politics we see in the US now is a major signal. I currently don't think it is a good signal. And I suspect it is a more complex signal than "get the wrongthink upper middle class suburbanites to shut up". But I'm just a layperson throwing some brush strokes out there and wanting to hear thoughts...
What evidence do you base this on? Do you have evidence quantifying how Parler users are more hateful than Twitter or Facebook?
Whether it will be applied even-handedly remains to be seen, but there is a law to deal with this, and I suspect it's a factor in why businesses of all kinds are running screaming from anything connected to the attacks (including other businesses that fail to themselves cut off any activity with a nexus to the attack, the attackers, and the apparent planning for future attacks): 18 USC Sec 2339A, which makes it a federal crime to knowingly provide any goods or services except medicine and religious materials connected to any of an enumerated list of federal criminal offenses collectively designated “terrorism”, punishable by fines and imprisonment for up to 15 years unless death occurs as a result of the crime, in which case the imprisonment becomes for any term of years or life.
Individuals are not held responsible for the threats and illegal speech they make. Look at all the threats made against people on social media. The fact that there is almost no accountability means it keeps happening.
The only repercussions most of the time is that the platform kicks you off. Part of it is, its their platform and from a business perspective having you around if you are too toxic isn't wise.
It seems like a society problem. Non enforcement and a lot of people with nothing to loose.
We support a market place of ideas because, it was argued that bad ideas would eventually be trumped by better ideas - only by examining bad ideas would we be able to move past them.
Part of that remains true today, but it does not account for the realities of mass communication.
The model ends up painting a passive, solitary image of ideas.
But ideas are neither passive, nor without context. Signal without context is noise.
Nor are brains neutral processors of information, they are vulnerable to psyops, malformed arguments, pressure, ignorance and emotion.
I have read propaganda, I have seen arguments which sound legitimate, but underlying it is xenophobia and hatred.
I know for a fact, that Popper was right and you cannot tolerate the intolerant.
They do not come to discuss or exchange ideas. They come to use your platform as an opportunity to gain followers.
And they use the gaps in our norms to create space for themselves.
Counter speech is not a panacea, it require conditions to work. If those conditions are not satisfied, the strategy fails.
The norms behind modern speech need to account for these trade offs.
The status quo comes with the trade off that partisanship will increase, more people will be radicalized.
This is the trade off, and people have to decide if they are willing to enjoy this trade off.
> ...what Parler is doing should be illegal, because it should be responsible on product liability terms for the known outcomes of its product, aka violence. ... But what Parler is doing is not illegal, because Section 230 means it has no obligation for what its product does.... Similarly, what these platforms did in removing Parler should be illegal, because they should have a public obligation to carry all customers engaging in legal activity on equal terms. But it’s not illegal, because there is no such obligation. These are private entities operating public rights of way, but they are not regulated as such.
[0] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-...
Parler was co-founded by an unelected billionaire as a "grassroots" way for the Mercers to push their ideology and their version of "acceptable speech". I don't really have any qualms with their power play getting shut down, and I don't think other businesses should be forced to support it.
It's no shock that DailyKos shouldn't have to host pro-Trump content. Nor should /theDonald have to host pro-Bernie content. We all agree that people can choose who to associate with, and that free association is important.
But AWS (and Facebook and others) didn't say "we're sites that present only one kind of content" the way /theDonald and DailyKos did. They presented themselves as universal tools for people to express themselves, build their own sites, install apps, etc.
So it comes as a shock when AWS says "we actually only want to support sites that present views that Jeff Bezos thinks are reasonable." And when Apple says "you can only download apps on your phone that we think do a good enough job moderating." And when Facebook bans people for posting wrong opinions.
The government can't and probably shouldn't force AWS to host content that Bezos doesn't agree with. It would be Amazon's right to host only content that is pro-Trump, or equally Amazon's right to only host content that is anti-Trump. But when Amazon presents something as a neutral utility but secretly enforces different rules, we can and should criticize them.
That's true even if all the content being removed today is garbage. I haven't seen any "worthwhile" content that's been affected by the recent moves, and I have never heard of any valuable speech on Parler. But I am still concerned that Apple gets to decide what apps I can install on my phone because they don't like the content. For every Apple (managed in California by socially liberal periople) there's a Walmart (managed in Arkansas by social conservatives) that will take the same powers and use them in a different way. Walmart is legally free to remove pro-BLM books from their online bookshelves, but we can and should criticize them if they do.
Honestly feels like just companies are trying to maximize their profits and "don't be evil" became just an old memory.
People are pretending like the platforms that deplatformed the group inciting violence are the only platforms on the internet that they could have used, they're not - they're not monopolies in regards to that. They are however the most convenient platforms to use because of various reasons, however we're not talking about having a right to convenience - we're talking about having the right to free speech, which everyone still does in America and on the internet.
Some advice: if you're going to have a mob boss and wannabe tyrant like Trump and rally your followers on a platform, I'd recommend using, depending on, technology layers of owners who are aligned with you and okay with inciting of violence; Trump goes on Fox News to say whatever the fuck he wants to millions of people while saying he's being prevented from free speech - come on now people, let's come back to reality and stop getting sucked into the gaslighting.
There's no natural monopoly that you can't find an alternative to if you're willing to spend enough effort.
AND we want to ban the whole platform X,
THEN it would be logical to ban also all the layers down the technological stack: AWS, Google Play Store, Telecoms that transported the traffic etc.
Indeed, X platform has approximately the same responsibility as other platform layers and hence they all should be punished.
Another idea is to punish them proportionally to their ability to check the content published on the platform so that telecoms probably will not be punished at all because they are not able to read encrypted traffic.
If the next layer refuses to ban the previous layer, then yes: keep going after the next layer in the stack.
There were about 10 million people on Parler before it was taken down. If you really think its comporable to an ISIS recruitment site, we got a much, much bigger problem here.
No, wait, hear me out.
No moderation isn't acceptable. Really. (If someone wants to make a counter-assertion, I merely point to this site.)
Non-transparent, corporate moderation doesn't seem palatable to anyone. There are just too many pitfalls.
Independent moderation falls apart when you consider that different fora have different moderation requirements. (A forum for Cinderblock the obese cat is going to be very different from any kind of political or technical site.)
The best case seems to me to be case-by-case, transparent moderation with precedents, similar to common law. And ultimately, I expect transparent moderation to, in the extreme, go to the court system, so that's not necessarily a bad starting point.
Unfortunately, that falls apart when large numbers of participants are (including, say, moderators) are not speaking in good faith. I see two possible ideas to address that: First, to tie accounts to physical identities (but not necessarily disallowing the account to be effectively anonymous), to cut the number of bots, multiple accounts, etc. Second, to attach an account to a user's reputation (which does break anonymity). The results I see are to cut down on the volume of crap while ensuring users have skin in the game (with a side order of making legal action against stalking, harassment, and threats).
But what about those situations that require anonymity? Most of those already have legal and social protections: psychological, religious, and legal counseling, for example. I would support anonymity for those fora, which places responsibility for moderation on the fora, of course, as well as meaning that the moderation cannot be transparent.
One area does require special handling: whistleblowing. It does require anonymity, and does not have any current legal or social protections. That needs to be fixed.
But anyway, as a general rule, the default for social media should not support anonymity. The only way to free providers like Facebook, Reddit, this site, or AWS from responsibility for what is posted there is to place that responsibility on the actual posters---having no responsibility doesn't work, and giving that power to the discretion of the owner of the provider isn't acceptable.
There are some objections that I think I can answer, but this comment is getting too long for me, so I'll wait until anyone cares.
And no, the irony of Parler's requirement of photo-ids and (allegedly) SSNs isn't lost on me.
With the average opsec of chat sites, would you bet on "effectively"? Ironically Parler itself just had a leak.
Even if a company currently has good opsec, it can be acquired and go downhill (or turn evil).
In the current climate, this comment could (and would) be construed as implicit support of Parler, with all the consequences. The rich left loves "consequences", except for themselves.
But suppose you set up a specific semi-public organization to act as the identity provider. (Like IANA? Maybe that's not a good example. :-)) Following something like a provably secure communications flow[1], the chat site gets a unique number representing the user. That's all they know about the user.
Alternatively, and with the approval of the user, the site gets the user's name or whatever the user wishes their online reputation to be associated with and can display that, for their comments to be taken seriously.
Ok, so let's take the example of Parler. Parler doesn't moderate its content, and actively resists attempts outside attempts to do so. However, anything illegal is still associated with individuals and the court system can force Parler to complete the link (that's the "effectively anonymous" approach, here), resulting in that user facing legal consequences. (This is opposed to the current system, where Parler could be technically designed to be unable to complete that link (Yeah, Parler are idiots.) and any kind of moderation relies on Parler's goodwill.)
AWS can continue to host Parler under the cover of a statement like "The POPO are keeping them in check." Or, AWS can kick them off based on measurable facts like "they got more than 10 or 15 subpoenas a day for three months".
As for your last paragraph...
Personally, I think Parler was a sewer filled with the morally and intellectually challenged who lack any sense of responsibility as citizens of the United States of America. (My understanding is that its users were limited to the US, btw.) I understand and agree with its vendor's decisions not to do business with them any more, in the same way I understand and agree with their decisions not to do business with ISIS recruitment sites.
The rich left loves "consequences", except for themselves. The rich right loves "consequences", except for themselves. The poor love "consequences", except for themselves. Libertarians love "consequences", except for themselves. You love "consequences", except for yourself. I love "consequences", except for myself.[2] Everyone loves "consequences", except for themselves. Because humans suck.
[1] Yeah, I'm a formal logic guy.
[2] Except I don't really, schadenfreude aside. I seem find in myself a streak of moralism and an excessive sensitivity to fairness. It sucks. Even my schadenfreude doesn't extend to the Darwin awards.
Elected billionaires (and millionaires/thousandaires) don't do much better.
Putting aside questions around whether or not a media filter has always existed in some form...
You're using social media hosted on EC2 instances that can be terminated vs instead of your local newspaper and other similar, less directly filtered options. That's the trade off. I don't really see anything unusual about it - a newspaper could fire a writer (or even hire writers that reflect a certain tone), and nobody batted an eye.
That's just "I'm for free speech unless I disagree with the speech", right?
Who decides what's too intolerant?
We all love our Popper quotes but it's a very hard line to draw. Nearly any opinion can be explained at being somehow intolerant if you try hard enough.
In general, are we sure that no conspiracy ever turned out to be true? How many heresies turned out to be correct and changed the course of our history? And how many people were persecuted in the name of spreading conspiracy? Why are we so afraid of conspiracies?
No one is threatening to kill an elected official over grassy knolls.
Times change.
I think people believe in conspiracies, not because they're mislead on a certain topic, but because they want to believe. So debunking conspiracies is attacking their faith, which is what causes zealotry.
It's more like spreading a religion, which, yeah, you can't really ban it. You just have to let people do their thing.
tl;dr I agree that one shouldn't censor it, but only because it does no good.
I'd argue this is purely selection bias. I think the biggest modern conspiracies are not yet called conspiracies by the public zeitgeist.
Ex. Remember Jeff Epstein? I'm sure there are dozens of powerful people who hope you don't.
Epstein was a Conspiracy. No theory required :)
Have you seen Twitter, Reddit? It's filled with hate, conspiracy, radicalization and racism.
It's astounding how quickly people fall back to their dfault political leanings and stop being objective.
If they can do this to Parler citing politically motivated excuse to shut them down, what stops your company from getting booted off the internet because some of your users posted "lets blow stuff up"?
This sets a dangerous precedent going forward and it affects all of us regardless of your political spectrum. I get that AWS is an independent commercial entity that has its own terms but do you realize the problem of trusting billionaires and their monopoly to always do the right thing?
Tomorrow, the currents might change, and it could be you too.
Does it change the flavor if I rewrite the phrase as
Private companies are regulating speech (in their applications, through their services and websites, etc.) as they are free to do under the US Constitution. While there may be a market for the speech Parler promotes and amplifies that market is not sufficiently large (in the opinion of these companies) to offset possible bad public relations or the loss of other customers.
I don't think there's any place for legislation that forces private companies to take a loss in this manner. It's clearly anti-free market and definitely anti-free speech, forcing Amazon to associate with speech they feel might harm the companies financial outlook.
Also, is it necessary? There are many BitTorrent tracker sites that are treated as illegal in the US and are still available. If Parler was really dedicated to keeping their website running they could surely do so. Maybe they won't have applications in the Apple App Store but that's not a right, is it? You have to have product that Apple feels helps the overall goal of their App Store, which is to make money for Apple.
Technically, there is no barrier that restricts a corporation from granting free space, so it isn't "free" to do so, moreso that it was not addressed because at the time of the framing of the constitution, the bigger dissenters of free speech were government, and religion, backed by government (or being the government.)
Indeed, it's my position that such laws would in fact be infringing on the free speech of those private companies. In addition they might cost those companies money, making these hypothetical laws also anti-free market.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
Historically newspapers, television and radio have decided what is acceptable to be published through their media. There is no reason modern internet-based media should be any different.
On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM
Excerpts:
Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.
Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.
Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.
(I'm going to leave aside the unfounded assertion that Parler was a "hate site." If it is, then every popular website is a "hate site," from Facebook and Google all the way down. Scores of prominent people who aren't hateful but for bizarre Left-wing constructions of the word "hate" use Parler to communicate with millions of people who are themselves not hateful conspiracy theorists.)
I always feel there's an unjustified logical jump on the part of authoritarian sentiments such as this. The argument seems to be, "X hosts hateful content that it refuses to remove. If we remove X, then we will have reduced hate."
This doesn't make much sense. Has anyone's mind actually changed because of Parler? It makes even less sense for conspiracy theories, where censorship makes conspiracy theorists feel like they're on the right track.
I remember looking up some moon landing hoaxer content on YouTube probably five to eight years ago. There was a lot of it on YouTube, but then YouTube also recommended some debunking videos (a few of which had been made specifically in response to the conspiracy theory videos themselves). The debunking videos were just frankly more persuasive. (The only issue with my little experiment was that the "Algorithm" recommended me conspiracy nonsense for a few weeks after.) There were no passive-aggressive, condescending propaganda boxes, no appeals to the authority of the media or legal system, no "fact checks." Just arguments for and against.
This is not to say that people can't do bad things with speech. We have stories like a random lynch mob forming in India over a viral series of videos shared via WhatsApp.[1] There are other stories like this. All are appalling. And technology has removed frictions that existed before to keep these things from happening.
But let's not forget that the world in which speech is restricted is much, much scarier. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was perpetrated by the most powerful members of Rwandan society, who used their monstrous power to slaughter Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus who spoke against the killings.
In the South under Jim Crow, speech was also violently suppressed with the aid of the states, who turned a blind eye to terrorist groups like the Klan going after black southerners or even white "race traitors" with lynching.
"Censorship, but only for the bad stuff" seems to be an unworkable system. People get riled up, and the consequences can be horrific, but they seem worse in a regime with heavy censorship that doesn't allow a safety valve for the bad ideas.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-de...
As for hateful rhetoric on Parler, that same hateful rhetoric exists on Twitter as well, don't fool yourself, it is only the fact that it is the left threatening the right that anyone allows it. Remember when Kathy Griffin held the bloody head of the President, or the current rise up and kill cops tweets you find everywhere on Twitter. Or the white people should all be dead tweets? Whether you agree to it or not does not therefore make hate speech. There is no clear cut defined line for hate speech to begin with. Anything can be declared hate speech, hell what I am saying now could be considered hate speech because I actually defend Parler and the people on its right to speech. At least then we can show examples of see this guy right here? He is a moron and believes in really dumb stuff. All they are doing by silencing these people is forcing them deeper underground where even more nefarious ideas and figures lie becoming more radicalized and more violent. But I guess that is what establishment wants, a perpetual idea to scare people with so that they give up even more freedom of thought.
And what did start-ups do before AWS et al? Didn't they 'just': rent a rack, fill it with computers, get an ASN/IP block, and make it accessible by DNS?
I understand it's more 'agile' to just spin up instances as needed, but are we in a place that the Old Way can no longer work? (At least theoretically.)
Doesn't Stack Overflow (still?) run on their own hardware?
* https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
Billionaires like the Mercer family, who fund Parler?
You're on a site run as part of the outreach for a VC firm where the owners are best buds with Peter Theil, Facebook board member, early Trump backer, a billionaire who literally hunted for a chance to sue a news organization out of existence because he didn't like a story they wrote about him; a site where a large number of the companies they fund and people who comment are intimately involved with AdTech and/or social media.
And you're only now noticing that billionaires have an unreasonable sway on discourse?
You didn't notice that not only does Rupert Murdoch own print press, book publishing, an TV all over the English-speaking world? You didn't notice the Mercer family also setting up Cambridge Analytica and being principal backers of Brexit?
I don't really care if Amazon crushes Parler. I also don't find back-doors, infiltration and R&D relationships with the government alarming or surprising. What matters to me is whether the government itself is corrupt.
I am a globalist and I do hope for more, not less integration between trade blocs. I think it would be beneficial to avoid the supply chain panic that underlies the extreme pursuit of labor cost arbitrage, but not in pursuit of national, but rather regional, balance of power and trade.
Surveillance is not going away. We cannot fight it. What can be combated is the willingness to harm others and the tendency to view others as separate from ourselves and as a danger to our interests.
But these tech firms are not yet absolute monopolies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, all display in my opinion anti-competitive and in some cases anti-consumer behaviour, but I think a new framework is needed to quantify harm in tech antitrust regulation.
I think Facebook is the most egregious offender because, as I have hyperbolically stated before, have constructed what amounds to a genocide machine. So while they are not "anti-consumer" in terms of price, they are anti-peace and stability of the system which hurts all of us. They disrupt the political process and not in a fun way.
Greenwald seems to be inviting pretty draconian anti-trust action, which would certainly be a bit controversial because some libertarians might not like it - ideologically the founders of Parler might be among them. On the other hand he seems to be stroking Parler as being some kind of underdog that is less bad somehow than other social networks. In my view Parler is only different in scale.
Again, Greenwald makes me very uneasy in this article because he comes out hard against "monopoly" but whose side is he on? I feel weird that I agree on paper that antitrust action is needed, but his article feels bought and paid for in some way.
> So why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather than Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a flamboyant showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis?
I am not sure this is true? The point could have been made without resort to hyperbole stretching into disingenuousness. What about that other platform should not be the issue - social network apps/sites are all subject to and propagate abuse.
Perhaps you mean why did we focus so much of our efforts on a single website? In this very moment, it's because this website was used to coordinate the efforts of a national group of potential terrorists. The pot boiled hard and fast.
In this particular case Trump directly ordered the attack. (At first I put quotes on order and attack, but alas no quotes needed, it's what it is.) But he has been flaring these flames since ... that fucking birth certificate dog whistle.
The idea that Democrats have been easy and kind on Twitter and FB is so disconnected with reality it’s actually kind of funny.
- Denying the current covid-sars-2 pandemic
- Direct calls to violence
I have seen people that were "fact-checked" (which is itself discussion, not silencing) for claiming that the 2020 election result is fraudulent.
None of this is silencing because your views don't align with the left. If you believe covid is a hoax created by George Soros or that Bill Gates bought votes in the 2020 election, your views don't align with reality.
I am not sure whether to assume you have not researched how he lost his platform or if you feel that defending molestation is "views that don't align with the left".
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/02/facebook-...
> Traditional far-right views
Can you give an example of a traditional far-right view any of the 3 people in the article were banned for?
The article mentions Alex Jones and Laura Loomer. They were taken off of social media repeatedly encouraging followers to harass people (mobbing). Encouraging/organizing mobbing will even get you banned from 4chan. The number of sites that allow such behavior is exceedingly low, and Alex Jones got several chances to stop before being taken off of youtube and facebook.
Regarding Laura Loomer, her twitter ban doesn't appear to constitute harassment by any reasonable definition[2]. Even if we grant she harassed Omar on twitter, that doesn't justify being banned from payment processors, uber, and food delivery services[3].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/02/tech/facebook-ban-louis-farra...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/laura-loomer-banned-tw...
[3] https://www.newsweek.com/paypal-bans-pro-trump-anti-muslim-f...
"I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim. Between the ages of 13 and 16, two men touched me in ways they should not have," he began a news conference in Manhattan. "This isn’t how I wanted my parents to find out about this either.”
"My experiences as a victim led me to believe I could say almost anything on the subject, no matter how outrageous," he said. “I do not advocate for illegal behavior...I believe the age of consent is right.”
- Milo Yiannopoulos
Although I think Milo is rude, bigoted, and unapologetic, he is a victim, and I agree that he should have plenty of latitude to speak on the subject. What he said in the podcast was inappropriate, and based on his apology, Milo seems to agree.
"The law is probably about right. It's probably roughly the right age; it's probably about okay. But there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age. I certainly consider myself to be one of them." - Milo Yiannopoulos
All of these companies, for what it's worth, seems to only use their power when its socially acceptable. For instance, they continue to abide by restrictive Chinese laws for the benefit of money. I'm convinced they will submit to the will of the state in Poland as well, where freedom of speech appears to mean something entirely different.
EDIT: This would be a less bad take if Parler had been booted just because people on the platform voted for Trump, but to be clear: Parler was booted because it was used to organize an armed rebellion with the explicit goal of finding and executing members of Congress certifying a democratic vote, and its users have been encouraging people to feed Democrats' families into woodchippers while making them watch.
Let's see. If I go and organize a violent insurrection using GMail, what does Google need to do to comply with it's own philosophy here? It seems that it needs to start scanning all emails for inciting violence and send them to a moderation queue. Of course, it's never going to do any of that, because unlike Parler it doesn't have any overlords holding it by the neck.
Google, Apple, and Amazon like to do whatever they can get away with when it comes to anti-competitive practices, and enjoy the protections granted to them as private entities. On the other hand, this shows that they're willing to also take unilateral action to silence millions of people, based on nothing more than a whim and a holier-than-thou attitude. There's a messy contradiction here. They're not subject to having to abide by the 1st amendment because they're private companies, but in practice they're in control of the majority of public discourse. This is a big problem.
And this returns me to what I think was a big point in the article. The response to any free-speech concerns has been: "if you don't like Facebook or Google's policies, you're free to create your own." But the sway of FB/Google's policies is no longer just over their own content, but also the platforms they manage. Which as it turns out, form the majority of the infrastructure of the internet.
This is literally how the US were born, cf. The Declaration of Independance. I'm fairly certain King George was praised by a majority.
What loopholes? The 1st amendment protects you from being persecuted by the government for your speech. It does not require private entities to publish, promote, transmit, or broadcast your speech. Similarly, discrimination is legal in the US. It is only illegal to discriminate against members of protected classes on the basis of them being members of those protected classes. Political affiliation is not a protected class.
Anyone that wants to spout off abhorrent things on the internet is free to do so. However, no private entity can be forced to allow such behavior. You do not have a right to have your tweet published by Twitter. You do not have a right to store your bits on an Amazon server.
The Biden Administration is getting stuffed with corporate executives and lobbyists of all kinds. If that alleged quote about fascism being the merger of corporate and state power, then congratulations, fascists! You won.
And if that quote is wrong, this situation is still bad, way worse than Trump.
Most of us here know - if you want a resilient, censorship-free service, you can still: buy your own physical servers, rent data centre space (or a garage), buy multiple transit pipes to ensure traffic can get to them from a variety of places. You can move your servers around if you have to and keep your sovereignty despite everything else changing. It's how the internet was designed! Amazon, Google, Apple and most other private companies can go whistle if they want you offline.
Sure it takes expertise, time, expense, negotiation... but that's the price of true freedom, internet patriots!
Instead they built everything on top of the conveniences and goodwill of a single US company, with no backup plan. Hardly living in the wild west - and that's this mob down to a tee. Rich, well-connected dorks who desperately need the society they organise to tear down - why be surprised when the society hits back in such a tiny way as terminating their AWS account?
If this is censorship, I'm a bowl of noodle soup.
https://www.coindesk.com/gotenna-bitcoin-wallet-mesh-network
If GMC wouldn't sell her a bus, she could just make her own!
Sure it takes expertise, time, expense, negotiation... but that's the price of true freedom!
Before anyone comes crying: I in no way support the assault on the Capitol, calls to violence (which should be illegal), alt-right ethno-state madness, Qanon delusions etc. Nazism is a cancer on society.
Buses are run by governments. And Rosa Parks wasn't advocating throwing molotov cocktails at bus drivers, she sat in the wrong damn seat in an act of civil disobedience.
> If GMC wouldn't sell her a bus,
It'd be great if GMC would refuse selling vehicles to insurrectionist militias, IMHO.
Your analogies aren't doing any good here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines
Not the one Rosa Parks was on.
>And Rosa Parks wasn't advocating throwing molotov cocktails
Rosa Parks no, but other Black groups most definitely. Same with Parler, not everyone was advocating violence.
>It'd be great if GMC would refuse selling vehicles to insurrectionist militias, IMHO.
Yup, stop selling them to the Black insurrectionist militias (codeword for any Black political group), would have been great.
>Your analogies aren't doing any good here.
They're pretty great honestly, describes the general idea well.
Agreed. But because some others didn't take her approach to civils rights, but were violent, why should she be canceled? It would be interesting to ask people at that time in history whether they saw her actions as violence or inciting violence. I bet the answer is a big ol' yes. I bet even many thought it was inciting the overthrow society/government.
Everything else in your response is bad faith
Literal Nazis?! Wow! Didn't know there were that many National Socialist German Workers' Party members in the US in 2021!
Those freedom fighters mostly peacefully protested at the Capitol to fight against tyranny and literal communism! /s
Or she and like minded people could have boycotted the bus lines, in modern terms "cancelling" them. (In case any non-US users don't know, that's exactly what they did, it was called the "Montgomery Bus Boycott").
Ironically, racists in those days tried to use the government to shut that movement down, just like Republicans are trying to use the government to go after people cancelling Parler today.
If you plan on your own AS and IP space - full network independence - ask which carriers are there, and plan on a quarter or half rack for a router. You'd also need to become a member of your regional Internet registry (e.g. ARIN in the US) and ask them for resources - e.g. IP space and an AS number.
When accounts build up a track record of flamewar, snark, political/ideological battle, and other things that break the site guidelines, we ban them. We have to, because otherwise this place will be engulfed by hellfire and then become scorched earth. Those things may be exciting and/or activating for a while, but they're not interesting.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site to heart, we'd be grateful. You can still express your views in that spirit, as many other HN users have been showing.
Right now though there's a small group of people looking to cause harm and damage using tools that barely existed 10 years ago and our laws won't keep up. Antisemitism and racism have no place in the world and private companies have no business profiting from its proliferation. Silicon Valley wants to use its power to make it harder for people with those views to meet, organize and share their views? Crack on.
I will use my limited resources and time on this planet to cry for someone else.
Imagine that Parler was a site dedicated to child pornography. Would anybody be complaining about it being shut down them?
Hopefully not. My point is that what Parler represented was equally odious. It's a hate speech platform and hate speech should not be tolerated.
And how is hosting hate speech “equally odious” to hosting photos of abused children anyway?!
You can use the same argument to abolish all free speech, just by claiming that anything your opponent says is equal to abusing children.
Hate speech translates into hateful actions, case in point was on display in the US Capitol last week.
This is challenging territory but to frame this as a free speech issue without acknowledging that there are limits to such is not being entirely honest about the matter.
Well this is exactly the issue here - because unless you believe in moral absolutism, why are these tech companies suddenly the arbiter of morality?
Like you said, if there were an app where 90% of the conversation was about child pornography, no one would cry "1984" if it's removed by Apple. So we're just having a conversation about where the line should be and if hate speech and planning insurrection should meet that standard, not beginning a rapid descent into thought control.
It obviously is. It started with child pornography which most everyone can agree on banning, now you are suggesting we apply the same ban to political discussion. That's the definition of a slippery slope in action.
Parler wasn't banned, the market decided they wanted nothing to do with it.
I don't think this means what you think it means, because it doesn't appear true.
The market usually means 'the free market' i.e. raw consumer demand - 'are people buying it?', 'vote with your wallet' e.t.c., By all accounts it looked like the market did want it - because they had a rapidly growing user base. Left to the free market, Parler would have continued.
The market does not mean the CEO's of other tech companies want nothing to do with it. It also does not mean that popular opinion is that it's bad.
One is speech - maybe hate, maybe political, maybe both - and one is distribution of illegal products of child abuse. They're not the same thing. They're not "equally odious" and honestly it's pretty gross you'd even pretend they are.
For example, I don't recall FOSTA/SESTA and its ramifications generating anywhere close to this level of breathless outrage on HN. The leftists I know (actual leftists, not the USA's conflation of centrist ideals with leftism) are all already very intimate with getting targeted and censored. Who is the "us" whose unfiltered work/speech/views have always been guaranteed a platform?
> For example, I don't recall FOSTA/SESTA and its ramifications generating anywhere close to this level of breathless outrage on HN.
You shouldn't rely on memory. It tends to fail everyone. Search engines are better
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22202110
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21830744
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16655494
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23636487
No, they should not be doing that. It shouldn't even be legal for Silicon Valley to do that. I don't care that you describe the people being censored as having negative traits, that is your political opinion.
I am a free speech absolutist but that doesn't mean you have a right to force others to endorse, host, or amplify your speech. Just that you shouldn't go to jail for it.
What this entire episode has shown is that capitalism's ability to offer alternatives is being stymied by network effects. In the USA that used to bring out the Anti-Trust big stick.
Parler can be shut down when it has been shown to have breached legislation passed by the country and has been found guilty of that in a court of law after due process.
It's not just free speech that is at issue here. It is innocent until proven guilty and due process. All of which are Human Rights issues. Or at least used to be.
Due process is inefficient and slow compared to letting unelected mega-corps determine what other businesses can exist and what speech can and can't be heard.
Imagine how awful a system with a 'burden-of-proof' and 'oversight' would be compared to just trusting the invisible hand of the market and profit motives determine the optimum course of action! Adam Smith proved that it would all work out fine anyway - there was a graph with some curves that proved it I think.
Now if only we had a way to merge all these mega-companies into one, bigger super-mega-corp. Imagine how much better that would be! Hopefully over time with market consolidation we can achieve anything.
> The fact that Parler isn't back online shows that there is an oligopoly in place.
It shows that they have mediocre-at-best technical talent in place, which isn't all that surprising given the content and target market.
> Parler can be shut down when it has been shown to have breached legislation passed by the country and has been found guilty of that in a court of law after due process.
This may be what you want, but it's not reality so I wouldn't frame it as a definitive fact like this.
> It's not just free speech that is at issue here.
It's not a free speech issue at all. Free speech means you can't be jailed or persecuted by the government for your speech.
> It is innocent until proven guilty and due process.
You're conflating a misunderstanding of Constitutional rights with criminal law. Due process is 100% irrelevant.
Yes, but we are seeing collusion
> It's not a free speech issue at all
Yes, it is.
> Free speech means you can't be jailed or persecuted by the government for your speech.
This is incorrect. You are confusing free speech with the 1st amendment.
The first amendment is the law that says the government cannot suppress your free speech. Free speech is not synonymous with that.
> Due process is 100% irrelevant
It is relevant to the extent that tech companies are operating as quasi governmental entities.
Buuuuuut I hope the larger community takes this as a cautionary tale about being completely beholden to single entities - whether that's AWS, or Facebook, or even larger entities such as "Silicon Valley" that are grouped by ideology - that you may agree with today, but not tomorrow.
Great, now what's that technology that lets my domain be split between two entities again so I can't get deplatformed?
There's plenty of ways to get around supposed censorship, rightly or wrongly.
You don't need AWS.
Great, thanks.
Nobody is saying they have no right to speech. AWS is just saying they don't have the right to speech on their turf.
On the contrary, people have generally been smart enough to not do business with companies that won't want to do business with them (for example, nobody is really sure where the various [\d]chans are hosted, and Pornhub self-hosts). There are any number of actually competent people on the left, the right and orthogonal to politics that aren't visibly getting denied "critical infrastructure" because they simply knew better than to use it in the first place; what we are really witnessing is rather entitled people realising they're not guaranteed a ready-made popular platform (whether for an individual's speech or for an app's deployment). The lack of guarantee of a platform itself is far from news.
What is not present are their radical wings, which were kicked away just like leftist violent radicals. Difference is that at least so far, mainstream left is ok with those being kicked.
It is possible to think that SV has too much power AND that they still have the right to deem what is acceptable on their own services.
You can be entitled to free speech without being entitled to a platform or an audience. Despite how much HN loves to bash on SV big tech, this isn't 1984 and there are plenty of other ways to spread hate if that's what you really want to support.
I'm growing really weary from all the slippery-slope/everything-is-being-censored/what-aboutism alarmist arguments.
There is quite a large spectrum between "any and all speech is acceptable, on the platform of your choosing" and "total censorship". Let's stop pretending its a binary choice.
It's legitimate concern that we have passed new thresholds of power, that the power can be exercised, and there's not much anyone affected can do about it.
Furthermore, it's disturbing how much those in power think -- and act -- alike. Isn't it weird that nobody has really broken ranks here?
Getting banned from Twitter for violating the ToS is not censorship.
Getting your Twitter clone kicked off of AWS for violating the ToS is not censorship.
Companies refusing to do business with you on ethical grounds is not censorship.
Anyone calling what we're seeing this week "censorship" is carrying water for fascists.
But in practice, the risk is that these labels will be applied much more liberally by self-interested parties precisely because they are unquestionably bad and hard to refute. If power hungry forces have access to a weapon which can be used to shut down discourse with no due process, it will most assuredly be used and create undesirable outcomes.
IMO we should all take issue with the ability of a small oligopoly to take these actions without any legal due process or recourse. History shows us that this kind of power without restriction in the hands of very few will lead to abuses.
If following a constitutional process for protesting a State's results in a presidential election is "inciting the insurrection", somebody better start fitting Nancy Pelosi for an orange jumpsuit: https://www.c-span.org/video/?185005-2/debate-ohio-electoral...
It's not sedition or insurrection to wait your turn and speak out in Congress that the results for a State are invalid. That's exactly what the Constitution stipulates you should do. It wasn't a crime or an insurrection when Pelosi did it and it's not a crime now.
If you want a word to describe then versus now I'd go with hypocrisy.
On the wider topic, it's sad that people's biases have become so blatant against others with different political views that they interpret every comment in the most disingenuous light, with the dumbest of assumptions. One does not have to call out "Violence is bad!" in every comment or statement that they make for it to be true. It should be assumed as that's the default for any sane individual in modern society.
So, yes violence is bad. We all know that. But unless you can show me where Cruz or Hawley actually committed acts of violence or directly instructed people to do the same, talk of them being guilty of insurrection is totally out of line. If telling your supporters to "March to the capital and make your voices heard!" is an insurrection we're not going to have room in our prisons.
So, this is exactly how leaders want you to think. I suggest reading up on how coups happen and how the leaders in those situations use the media and exactly what they say and how they say it. We have a lot of examples in this world and they have been very well documented too. Also in these cases its irrefutable evidence once the coup has happened who the bad guys are, so the books will not be controversial.
Here is a book to look at if you want - Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.
And those people trying to claim these tech companies are "utilities" are insane. There is a 0% chance that any tech company is going to be declared a utility in the next several decades in the US and to think otherwise is totally absurd. So those arguments just hold no water.
Boycott: "withdraw from commercial or social relations with (a country, organization, or person) as a punishment or protest."
They just sent the biggest signal they possibly could that they're willing to play ball to keep one party in full control of our government forever.
Big Tech is part of your government now. As if years of senior cabinet positions for Big Tech employees wasn't already enough of a clue.